Dragonfly Media Curacao

Coming thursday we will give a presentation on Internet Marketing (or: How you can understand what your internet marketer is talking about) for the Curacao chapter of HSMAI.

HSMAI is an international association of sales and marketing people in the hospitality industry. The first caribbean chapter was founded last year in Curacao and the idea is that its members learn more about their profession through events (like this presentation), conferences, the main HSMAI website and their magazine.

The hospitality industry of Curacao is a real growth sector and new hotels are being built left and right. This is good for the island (provided there are enough tourists and means for them of coming here, of course), but it also means that they need to work harder on marketing their properties because of the extra competition. This is less relevant for a Marriott or a Hilton for whom much of the marketing is handled centrally from the US, but it is very relevant for the many independent hotels on Curacao (Kura Hulanda, Floris, Avila, etcetera).

Many of the local hospitality companies are currently doing something online. However, their efforts are mostly limited to a banner on a local tourism website or a PPC campaign with Yahoo. Some have also discovered the many uses of Tripadvisor and Expedia, but these are exceptions. We currently know of only one hotel on Curacao that is seriously considering a long-term sustained SEO/link building effort and there is one hotel that has been doing this for a few years now (and is greatly benefiting from it).

These two reasons (more competition and the lack of knowledge) are the main reasons why we are doing this presentation and why we think it would be very useful for the local hospitality companies to come by. I am not a great speaker so people may also get a good laugh or two at my expense :)

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 8:15 am and is filed under Internet marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.