Clusters proposals for Tourism

Submitted by Tedora Aibu on 24 July 2020

Summary of the European Alliance Against Coronavirus Daily Webinar on 22 July 2020.

The participants in this daily meeting looked at a particular sector in the tourism ecosystem: the events business. Gorazd Čad from Toleranca Marketing and Teodora Jilkova from Veritas Cluster shared insights on how the Covid-19 pandemic has changed this sector and what measures companies and regions are taking to adapt to the new necessities.

Gorazd Čad introduced the different approaches in marketing strategies to overcome the Covid-19 crisis and to achieve the “new normal” momentum, as they now have to react to the fear and safety needs of the clients. Toleranca Marketing developed a series of surveys carried out among European meeting planners. The results of these surveys showed that hybrid events may represent a rising trend in the future event planning, and the use of the mask will be a new constant. Most companies currently struggle to survive and decrease the expenses and finding way to save money. The priority for meeting planners now is to carry out postponed events. For these events, the behavioral change lead to a higher safety level.

The recommendations from Gorazd to restart the marketing are: (be human and personalize the communication, give meeting planners more choice and control, shift to digital and mobile, make events better, not just safer, listen to customers and take the agile approach.

Nevertheless, live events can offer more possibilities than online events because face-to-face meeting have a greater impact on communication between people. As Teodora Jilkova pointed out: we are social beings. The pandemic and consequent restrictive norms of the last few months reduced opportunities to establish new or foster existing collaborations among clusters and associations, which have been previously successfully done during business events. One example of this collaboration is the organization of the TCI conference and the developing network, and the Black Sea and Balkans Conference World Summit. The aim of these conferences is to share knowledge, proposals, best practices and build valuable partnerships to improve and develop the tourism sector.