Is the Cyprus Tourism Industry Online ??

Inspired in the article of Mark Seall published on the Travolution blog I made a small study of how the Travel Sector of Cyprus is cooping with the evolution the internet took after 2006.

Web 2.0 is a term that whoever works with the net knows that basically means online human relationships. In other words the internet is not a source of information but a place to share experiences, opinions and influence decisions.

In Cyprus the LEADRS of the tourism industry are still thinking tour operator will influence tourists and bring them to Cyprus. They still think that their restaurant in a five star hotel is a facility that has to be discovered once the customer has checked in, they still think that incoming agents do not even need a web site, they call Facebook a place to play and not to relate, they believe that Google is cheating and wants their money to bring them traffic.

After www.emergence2009.com in February 2009 I have had many, many , many conversations with tourist actors in Cyprus. Hoteliers, incoming agents, regional boards, tour guides and others have the opinion that the net is not real. What ever happens online is virtual, and has no influence whatsoever in their job, bank account or customer relations.
I will not mention names of companies that lead this country's tourism but we all know who they are. Well check for them on facebook, twitter or even google and you will realise that I am not making stories up.

I will only give one detail. Every 1000 tourist service related searches on the global Web sphere 800 results are coming from the other Cyprus, the one we all remember but we all deleted.

Post originally posted on emergence 2009

How to attract Tourist in a town- Larnaca is the example

Cyprus those days celebrate one of the oldest ever traditions of the country. Kataklysmos, is the water Festival that commemorates the Biblical flood by which God destroyed all living creatures on earth. The festivals take place at the coastal towns of the island.

Larnaca has a long tradition in this festival and the town hall prepared a very attractive, as they say, programme of the festival. A friend of mine sent an email to the town hall the 20th of May to get some info about the festival since the municipal web site had no information then www.larnaka.com . Well until today 27th of may the town hall did not have the programme ready to publish it either on the web or to the press or even send it by the old traditional fax.

My friend, at my presence, called the Municipal Cultural Services many times at +357 24 657745 but never managed to talk to anyone. Today finally the call went through and the person who attended the phone call passed the call to someone else, this someone else passed to the so called responsible person. Finally someone responsible. At the question if they got an email requesting info the answer was that the emails are reviewed by the mayors secretary and answered whenever the Mayor can since he revises them. The email was sent to municipality@larnaka.com the 20th of May asking information about the festival. The mayor in his policy to be close to the citizen answers all mails, I guess.

Anyway, this responsible person said that the programme is not ready yet to be published. The festival is 10 days, the 6th until the 8th of June. The lady on the phone recommended to my friend to make the booking at the hotel for the whole family and if the programme of the festival is not suitable the booking can always be cancelled, and since the booking is from Cypriots the hotel will not take any cancellation fees and no credit card guarantee. I guess this responsible person is also the director of the hotel or hotels in Larnaca.

I will not continue anymore because the rest if Kafkian. Anyway this is what I call Regional Marketing. The town hall of Larnaca apart from running the town also knows a lot about cancelation policies of hotels, reservation terms and conditions and especially they have a complete knowledge of the availabilities of the hotels in the town as well as that hotels apply different terms to Cypriots and different to Swedish, Russian or other white customers.
Thank you Larnaca for boosting the image of your town and for your efforts to promote our traditions in the globe!!!

Mobile web is a challenge for Tourist Destinations and Tourist Products.

According to Yahoo 30% of the British surf on the net when they are in the loo. Yes 30% of the British consumers actually use their blackberries, iphones etc when they sit on the toilet.

This is defiantly a huge challenge for the tourism world. While using the loo usually is a relaxing moment and it can be a crucial moment when it comes to decision making. This can sound weird but I am sure that the correct marketing message can be sent from destinations and tourist products-services so as to influence a decision.

Mobile web is still something that the Travel world and especially official destination sites did not take into account seriously. Very few travel pages have a mobile version, many a readable but still hard to use and slow. What is even worse is the online booking systems, when it comes to making a booking using a mobile device is still hard and confusing.

So, now in times of crisis we need to be creative, we need to invest in thinking and acting, we need to test and get feedback from users, we have to lead and not to follow slowly.

The tourism industry needs to take initiatives in making things easy for the end user since is the end user that brings us food to our table today and he/she will bring us more tomorrow with des intermediation.

Here I would like to thank Richard Sedley for his twitter that inspired this post and Gerd Leonhard for his vision on Mobile Web.

Yahoo article here

29fuzq5cyv

Cyprus sings Tourist Agreement with China

Forty eight million (48,000,000) Chinese travelled outside Chine last year . This is the data the minister of Tourism of Cyprus announced on the Cypriot radio stations. During his trip to China, Mr. Antonis Paschalides had as objective of reinforcing the trade and tourism links between the Asian Goliath and the Mediterranean David.

During a morning programme of a local radio (if a recall well was in Radio Pafos www.radiopafos.com) Mr. Paschalides clearly stated that his aim was to built strong tourism relationships between China and Cyprus and therefore an agreement was signed.

I must say that I am totally relived, I think that after this visit in China all the hoteliers, incoming agents, restaurateurs, excursion organisers, tour guides (especially the Mandarin speaking ones) and the rest of the tourist sector feel relived. The bankers are tranquil that the tourist sector will pay them back all their loans and they will be able to lend to the sector even more since the Chinese are on their way.

I am sure that the Minister has also agreed with Cyprus Airways to start direct flights to Beijing (inChinese: 北京) and Shanghai ( in Chinese: 上海). I also want to believe that our embassy and consulates in China have made all the adequate arrangements to provide the many thousands, probably millions of Chinese with visas. I am also positive that all the implied governmental departments such as the department of Archaeology have already made all the necessary arrangements to translate the tourist guides in Mandarin and Cantonese as well as the web sites of Cyprus Airways and the CTO.

So the next flourishing business in Cyprus is teaching Chinese to Russian, Polish and Romanian waiters, receptionists and housekeepers.

I am wondering if our chefs are ready to cater for Chinese.

Here is the official site of the Chinese Tourism Office

Paphos Fine Dining Experience - Italian food at its best

Many times we think that hotel restaurants cater only tasteless buffets for mass tourism. I must admit, that this was the perception I had and the experience I gained after many years of working in the industry. This was until I stepped in the Bacco Restaurant in the Elysium hotel in Pafos.

I was not expecting to have such a fine Italian dinner in Cyprus. I am a big pasta fun, I worked in Italian restaurants for some years. I am worse than an Italian when it comes to al dente pasta. The Elysium hotel has probably the best Italian restaurant in Cyprus. Bacco, an internationally known Italian brand has the reputation of excellence and defiantly the fine dining experience I had in Elysium last night confirms it.

So if you are in Paphos and you want to give a surprise to a friend, to your wife to your husband or your lover, do not hesitate, call the Elysium and book a table in Bacco Restaurant.

A suggestion … try the Tiramisu… simply fantastic.

Is online Marketing is a matter of training as well ?

When we talk about online marketing most of us think of IT (Information Technology), well this is a very wrong idea. IT people are very good in applying technologies and give them to us, to the operations people to use them.

When it comes to the internet, technologies are just tools, tools we have in our hands as operations to use them. We need to be trained but not on the use of technologies but on the use of our skills online. The internet gives us the technologies most of the time for free, we need to train our brains to use them the same way we use the telephone or the vacuum cleaner. IT can prepare a web site but IT are not the ones who are going to position our product, brand and services in the online world. Think offline! We ask the graphic designer to prepare a brochure, we ask the printer to print them but we are the ones who are going to give them to right people. It is us, Sales and Marketing who will sit down with the customer to discus the services we printed in the brochure, so we should be the ones who talk to the customer online. For this we need to be trained.



Visit Improve

Touristic Patriotism

In times of global crisis and global markets someone will think that the title of this post anachronic or even stupid. Well I think is neither.

In times of global crisis the first thing we need to do is to have solidarity with the ones more affected and definitely reaching the 3 world countries is much harder than doing something for our neighbours.

Now the saying Think globally and act locally has more meaning than ever, first see what is happening around us, very close to us and then rise our sight towards the horizon.

I strongly believe that is we spend some of our holidays in our country and the rest abroad then the tourist industry worldwide would be much less affected.

I will take as example Cyprus. Cypriots are only 500,000 people approximately who a large percentage of us go for holidays abroad. I would suggest that we all think that by spending one week of our summer holidays in Cyprus we are helping a lot maintaining people’s jobs, we keep the Small and Medium Size companies alive and we contribute to the well being of the country.
So now that summer is beginning try to escape for a weekend and rediscover your own island.

Join the Cyprus Short Escapes Online Community and choose one of the routes the CTO offers, choose the one that suits you most. Welcome to Cyprus. Ohh last but not least foreigners are more than welcome to join, please tell your friends as well, rediscover Cyprus as it is, natural and authentic.

Experience Real Cyprus, the one we all forgot

Cyprus Short Escapes - See Cyprus

View more presentations from ShortEscapes.

Helios Directors face 1.190 charges... finally after 4 years

Four years after the Helios Airways disaster 4 directors of the company are now prosecuted. Andreas Drakou President of Helios (also heavily involved in the Libra Holidays fraud), Demetris Pantazis Managing Director of the Airline, Giorgos Kikkidis, director for flights and Ianko Stoimenov chief pilot and training director. The four of them are facing 1.190 accusations each.

Here the question is what is going to happen next? Are those people going to jail? Are they going to banned from running an airline again? I think that in Cyprus we did not reach this level of democracy yet. In Cyprus is much easier to go to jail if you broke in a house than being probably responsible for the death of 121 people (they are accused for 119 not for the pilot and the co-pilot).

Andreas Drakou has been in the market of Cyprus tourism for many years. For many ignorant people he was considered one of the “fathers” of tourism in Cyprus with the descent of Libra Holidays as the savior of the Tourism Industry of Cyprus. It was then when he managed to convince hoteliers to partner with him and today 90% of the hotels Libra has agreements are still unpaid , some of them since 2007.

Thank you Meletis Apostolides

The case of Apostolides Vs Orams in the European Court of Justice is not only a human rights victory, is not only a victory of the Right over the Wrong is at the same time the most important injection if dignity and pride the Cypriots got after 1955. Meletis Apostolides has given back to all those who lost their houses and land in 1974 war (being those Greek – Cypriots or Turkish Cypriots) the hope that no foreign occupying army can create a status quo at least in the European territory.

Thank you Meletis for having the strength that nobody else did, thank you for not listening to the politicians of any party, thank you for believing in justice and proving to all the Europeans that the last thing one man has to loose is faith in what he believes .

I would also like to thank all those politicians that worried about the drop of sales in the real estate business in Cyprus. I would like to thank all those English people that have proven once again that they do not give a dam about how those houses they bought for peanuts in the so called “North” belong to people that for the last 35 years were not able to sleep in their own beds. I would also like to thank Mrs. Blair who proved once again that big law firms can actually make lots of money by trying to twist justice.

Ohh and for those who fear impact on tourism saying that this will scare the brtins away, please do not worry there are many intelligent britons, much more than the stupid ones. Good british citizens who really like Cyprus feel much better now coming to Cyprus than ever before.

The Opera in Pafos (Paphos) provokes personal data protection Tragedy

The web page of Paphos Festival, the official web site of the festival is promoting “Lakme by Leo Delibes” and on the reservation form the web has on the bottom left you they are asking to the visitor of the web to enter personal data (all of them obligatory) and the data is not protected by secure server. Among this data is the Credit Card details.

What does it mean in simple words this irresponsible and illegal action of the town hall led by Mr. Vergas. This means that you and I as consumers if we enter our data to buy a ticket for the opera our data travel without encryption and they can be stopped by any amateur hacker who will be able to use our credit card details to obtain money or goods.

I am wondering if an official website paid by the citizens of this town is acting in such an irresponsible way how do these gentlemen who run the town expect us to have any kind of respect. Their ignorance and their irresponsibility puts in danger all of us.

Please check by yourself. The web is http://www.pafc.com.cy where the Opera is announced. The link for reservation form is located down left if you click Reservation Form then the web takes you a form that is talking about “Madama Butterfly”, last years opera, they did not have the dignity to change the text on top, which means that all of those people who might booked the opera from this site last year were exposed to serious data protection irregularities. Oh by the way the link Online reservation is not working and I sincerely think it never worked.

I wonder if any official will have the dignity to apologize here on this blog, over facebook , plaxo , linkedin and all the other social media this article is published.

Last but not least the same web regognises "Macedonia" as a Country. I think the next step would be that the Townhall of Paphos should open a consulate in Skopia. See yourself the pull down of the reservation form.

I would like to congratulate once again Mr. Vergas and his fantastic team for being so capable, especially those who made the website and those who paid them. Bravo.