After a successful outdoor campaign in India, Taiwan Tourism Bureau (TTB) has decided to launch its online campaign for destination marketing and promotion in India. “We did a lot of outdoor campaign at airports, shopping malls, highways and movie theatres after the announcement of our ambitious ‘2 20:20’ strategy towards the end of 2018 to bring awareness among Indian outbound travelers. Now, we have to convert this awareness into purchasing power. So, the next campaign will be online which will roll out in July,” Trust HJ Lin, Director, Taiwan Tourism Bureau (Singapore office), said during a media interaction in New Delhi. Taiwan’s ‘2 20:20’ strategy aims at tapping the top 2 per cent of the high-end leisure traffic from India to Taiwan to attain 20 per cent growth in Indian outbound to Taiwan by 2020. The reason we go to top 2 per cent as they are looking at newer destinations, Lin informed.
Divulging more details about the online campaign, Lin said that the Bureau is in talks with MakeMyTrip. “It’s a great idea to partner with OTAs as they have very huge market share. Most of their employees are IT professionals and for us it is very easy to communicate as Taiwan is an IT destination. Right now, we are just talking with MakeMyTrip but we will talk with others such as search engines and SEOs as well. Hopefully, we will start our online campaign in July-August,” Lin said and added that the outdoor campaign brought very good result for us. He made it clear that the Bureau is not going to put all budgets with OTAs in the online campaign. “We will keep some budget for online media as we will have tour packages to sell and at the same time we will also have to increase our awareness,” he added. TTB will continue to work with traditional travel agents as well.
Lin said that the outdoor campaign which was launched in November last year resulted into very encouraging results for us. “We started our outdoor campaign last November and we also partnered with Cox&Kings. In February 2019, we had 41 per cent growth from India. In May, we received 350 pax group incentive tours from India,” he informed.
With the online campaign, Lin wants to create awareness about Taiwan’s visa system which is quite easy but Indian travelers are not much aware about this. Travellers who have a valid visa for US, Japan, Korea, schengen and Australia are eligible for a free e-visa in Taiwan. “We find that OTAs can put visa process on their portal and it saves a lot of time in educating about visas,” he said.
Replying to a question over promoting Taiwan through cruise tourism, Lin said that Taiwan is the number 2 cruise destination in Asia after China. “The Princess Cruise or Star Cruise use Taiwan as mother port. The cruise market is very popular and we would like to leverage to this advantage. We have to find someone to sell it in India and we can sell it through OTAs,” he said.
Taiwan welcomed 40,000 Indian visitors in 2018, reflecting a 9.8 per cent growth in 2018 making India one of the fastest growing markets. He said that approximately 40 per cent of the Indian visitors are business travelers. In 2018, Taiwan received 11 million inbound visitors. Buoyed by this growth, the Bureau has increased marketing budget for India from US$1.02 million to 2 million in 2019.
