New Developments in Finnish Tourism & Digital Partners in China

Visit Finland told story via digital partners for Chinese tourism push, and introduced the market, local partners, WeChat marketing and future expectations.

China is the largest tourist spending market in Finland, especially in accommodation and shopping.At the same time, they are generally interested in outdoor activities such as dog sledging and aurora chasing tours in winter, and lakeside getaways in summer.Although Finland has a large number of innovative technologies, tourism services are in traditional methods.However, with more Chinese tourists opting for free independent travel (FIT),

Finnish tourism brands need to accelerate digital transformation.

In order to achieve this goal, from 2016, the Finnish Tourist Board has cooperated with China E-Commerce and launched its own tourism project.In addition to online cooperation, they also cooperated with traditional tourism operators. What’s more, Finland will launch destination campaigns with Utour in the next two years, leveraging the Chinese partner’s local resources to promote Finland’s summer and lakeside offerings.

Because of the importance attached to B2C and the popularity of WeChat in China, Visit Finland has deployed a strategy to leverage the influence of its partner agencies or influencers on WeChat’s subscription platform, meanwhile, concentrated on the stories told by their partners. Fortunately, the platform has a lot of views.

Finally, they think that they should not blindly pursue numbers in the future, but should pay attention to the latest needs of Chinese tourists.In addition, Finland has become a part of ITB CHINA 2018, a B2B travel trade show that focuses on China’s outbound sector.

The content mentioned in this article is related to the distribution strategy in our digital marketing course that according to the analysis of passenger data in previous years, Finland has discovered the great potential of Chinese tourists source market and accurately positioned and segment, cooperated with local online travel distributor Fliggy and Ctrip in China to promote local tourism and recreational projects. “going it alone” will become a thing of the past, the evidence is certainly stacking up in favour of considering a business alliance. As known that distribution decisions often interdependent with other marketing mix variables, Finland invested and built up a close relationship with Chinese digital partners matches the Millennial travelers’ needs, who have the highest purchasing power in the neat future, i believe it will brings huge potential consumption.

The capacity to line up business goals with the needs of customers, take an agile approach to decision-making and execute quickly and effectively can make or break the attempts at digital change. That’s why collaborating with a partner that can react swiftly to shifts in the market. With the increasing number of Chinese tourists opting for free independent travel in recent years, Finland speed up their efforts on digital transformation, including improvement in reservation systems, inventory management and distribution channels, for example launching its own tour product Aurora Project partnered with Fliggy (formerly Alitrip) which bundling flight, hotel and airport chauffeur services, to better service FIT consumers.
Besides, in the mix of its online and offline marketing strategies, Visit Finland highly value the importance of digital marketing on B2C channels like different social media and online platforms, particularly in the China market, so that it Fully exerted influence its partner agencies on WeChat’s subscription platform. Taking it as an example that Visit Finland worked on getting stories told on its partners to get greater exposure, and what Finland valued most in the partnership with Fliggy is their story-telling skills to increase direct customer engagement. Storytelling is probably best defined or understood through the impacts that it makes and the impressions it leaves, branding is storytelling as well, so that partnered with Fliggy now elevating brand awareness of the destination Finland and set the stage for success.

Source : https://www.tnooz.com/article/visit-finland-chinese-tourists