If you would ask me to give a good example of what high level cultural tourism can be, then I would without any doubt share the experience we had with the two last 2 editions of the Valletta Baroque Festival housed at Teatru Manoel; Malta’s National Theatre.
It is an honour to have been able to take care of the pr, marketing and ‘customer care’ for this beautiful festival which was set up by Kenneth Zammit Tabona in 2013. Its unique selling position is the fact that it can present the best (inter)national baroque artists and ensembles in the venues the music was composed for … as Malta breaths Baroque.
2019 was the first year in which the festival and the research department of the Malta Tourism Authority was able to set up a survey to get more insights about its audience. The first edition of the survey was used as a pilot for the 2020 edition. Interesting to see is that the indications given by the outcomes of pilot were strengthened by the 2020 survey.
These are a couple of outcomes from the recent survey: The festival has a high NPS (high quality concerts, beautiful venues) so visitors are very likely to recommend the festival to others, 63% of the audience comes from abroad, they stay in 4 to 5 star hotels, they attend 3 concerts or more and for 65% of them it is their main purpose to visit Malta. So when looking at the typography of the cultural tourist they are purposeful visitors, seeing themselves as concert goers not as tourists.
As a marketing team we used already the insights of the first survey and the experience we had whilst observing as well as talking to the concert goers in 2019 to create a strategic integrated marketing plan for the festival. Since experience is key, we knew we had to focus on the overall experience. So we used a visitor experience map, mapping all the touch points a concert goer ( being it international and local) has, to implement the pr and marketing strategy.
This will be the basis for a paper we (Experienced Design) and the research department of the Malta Tourism Authority are working on, so that we can share this interesting case study in a proper way … so stay tuned 😉
Ann Laenen 