TAT planning A-to-Z tourism campaign with social influencers

“Amazing New Chapters: From A-to-Z Thailand has it all” is the new brainchild from the Tourism Authority of Thailand that aims to use influencers to attract people to Thailand. Like the 26 letters of the alphabet, the TAT hopes to sign up 26 influencers, both regional and global, in an attempt to reach 26 million travellers around the world. The campaign is scheduled to launch officially at the online international travel trade show ITB Berlin in March of next year.

As is customary in the Thai government, the plan has been announced before they have signed on any influencers to take part in the tourism campaign. (See: Lalisa’s New Year’s Eve Concert.) But they have set their sights on Formula One driver Alex Albon as he is Thai and British.

The tourism campaign will aim to find and sign on influencers from different areas, categories, and markets, to represent all the different tourism styles and products that Thailand has to offer, one for each letter of the alphabet. To qualify as an influencer tourism ambassador for Thailand, an influencer must have at least 1 million followers on their social networks.

The TAT has called on their offices around the world to seek out and recruit possible candidates for the planned promotion which is part of the TAT’s planned drives to show the world that Thailand is back as a tourist destination. The focus will shift from attracting huge numbers of tourists like before Covid-19 – 40 million in 2019 – to attracting high-quality bigger-spending tourists by offering a better tourist experience.

3 performance metrics will be closely watched for next year’s tourism. First, the TAT has set a goal of getting each flight filled with 70% seat occupancy on average. Second, hotel bookings that have hovered around 25-30% this year (though that number likely doesn’t factor in a significant number of hotels that have closed completely) will have the goal of filling to 50% occupancy. Finally, the TAT is focused on getting per passenger spending up, with a target of 4,100 baht per person for domestic travellers and 62,580 baht per international traveller.

Doing the math, that oddly specific number might hint that the TAT has set an unspoken target of 8 million or 16 million visitors for 2022, as that unrounded number would total 500 billion baht or 1 trillion baht respectively.

The A-to-Z campaign aims to grow tourism with the help of 26 influencers, starting with F1 racer Albon, who the TAT says has expressed interest and would promote racing which is already popular in places like Buri Ram. Albon raced for Red Bull Racing this year but will join the British team Williams next year and has 1.3 million Instagram followers as well as a significant number on Twitter and Facebook.

SOURCE: Bangkok Post