The Innsbruck Tourism Board and what I was able to learn.
IBS did a tremendous job in making sure that the companies we visited on the trip were interesting and forthcoming with teaching our group about their company and what they do. From BMW to Hard Rock Cafe I personally felt that each company provided valuable insight. Even though the above mentioned is true the company that I enjoyed the most was The Innsbruck Tourism Board. The Innsbruck Tourism Board focused in on two things that I am very curious about. For one, I am a marketing major so finding out processes that other companies use while marketing their organizations is definitely something of interest. Secondly, I enjoy cities and being able to tour them past the tourist attractions. Being able to go to a city and try local restaurants and museums is something that I find myself doing regardless of the city that I venture into. The Innsbruck Tourism Board highlighted both areas as they were an organization that focused on marketing the city of Innsbruck and attracting visitors to the city. The reason I found the organization and conversation so interesting was because I wanted to know how a small city like Innsbruck is able to market itself against larger European cities like London and Paris. I assumed that there must have been a secret to their success because they had hosted various Olympic games and attracted millions of visitors a year as leisure travelers.
Throughout the conversation, I was able to learn that Innsbruck was able to leverage itself as a tourist destination by getting support from every local business in the city. Every single business in Innsbruck pays a tourism tax to the organization that serves as a benefit to both the tourism board as well as the local businesses. The tourism board will help promote the various businesses with the help of the money that they receive from the business. I thought this was such a great way to leverage the organization and showed how much the actual city of Innsbruck values the tourism board. The tourism board also mentioned how they were able to grow their international tourist base by advertising in India. India has one of the largest populations in the world and the tourism board mentioned how they tried to take advantage of the curiosity of Indian tourist who wanted to go on the slopes. The tourism board would advertise in various Bollywood movies and commercials to grow curiosity about the city and hopefully convince Indian citizens to visit. A year after the advertisements in India, the city itself saw a tremendous spike in tourist from India. Even though the tourism board wasn’t able to completely credit the advertisement in India to the spike in travelers, it can be assumed that it definitely didn’t hurt.
The Innsbruck Tourism Board also mentioned about the importance of knowing what your good at and what you can bring to the table as an organization. Of course they were talking about the city of Innsbruck with this analogy and they were making clear that they don’t try and be a destination that they are not. They are not a city where you come to play warm sports or go to the beach, they are a destination for people who want to ski and snowboard so they advertise to that market. I found that fact to be relevant because in business some companies market to the wrong audience and end up hurting their business’s bottom line but The Innsbruck Tourism board tried not to waste time in that space but rigorously worked hard on the niche market of winter athletics.
The visit certainly was not the only one I enjoyed but I can definitely say it was my favorite because it was something that catered to my own curiosity. The Innsbruck Tourism Board is something I had no idea about before ever stepping foot in Austria but I felt once I left I had a decent grasp on what the board actually was and what they accomplished. I could see myself working in a space similar to this one day as being able to travel and speak to compelling narratives about a city while convincing people to visit might be right down my alley!
