Extra tourism $1m to ‘undo marketing loss’

August 18, 2009 04:51:53 PM

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Organisers of this year’s Tourism Forum say the extra $1 million they want from government for Tourism Fiji will go towards regaining the loss in advertising power overseas because of the devaluation.

Forum chairperson, ANZ Bank’s Manager Strategy and Planning, Finau Soqo said the industry will have to put together a submission asking government to raise its allocation for Tourism Fiji to $24.5 million in the 2010 Budget, up from $23.5 million this year, the biggest allocation ever.

“That extra million is to get us what we’ve just lost because it just all of a sudden became 30 cents more expensive to buy the same amount of advertising space outside of Fiji,” Soqo told FijiLive.

She said the other key outcomes of the Forum, held at the Intercontinental Golf Resort and Spa in Natadola on Friday, was to establish an implementation committee that would execute the 2007 to 2016 tourism development plan.

“That’s particularly critical because over the years we’ve talked about our problems to death. Year in year out we’re talking the same things over and over again so it’s time to do what we say we’re going to do.

“Particularly now with competition, with the global economic crisis, climate change and competition coming in from the region, it’s important for us to do the right thing,” Soqo said.

The Forum also saw the need to align the tourism development plan established in 2007 with Tourism Fiji’s marketing plan.

“The development plan looks at the development of the industry as a whole from landowner issues to infrastructure to support issues.

“The marketing plan is essentially how we position Fiji to the world. The key thing is to align the two and on the back of that to align it with government’s plans to develop infrastructure to support industry growth,” Soqo said.

She said the key was getting a framework for execution so that even when the people behind dovetailing the two plans moved on, the agenda was still the same - to either get to the billion dollar foreign exchange earning mark or one million visitor arrivals.

“A billion dollars is already around the corner because we’re already at $898 million in foreign exchange. We have about 540,000 people coming into Fiji.

It took us about 20 years to get half a million visitors so it’s not about change but the rate of change. We reckon we could get to a million visitors in five years,” Soqo added.