Cinnamon TBCasia sets benchmark at ITB Berlin
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Dileep Mudadeniya
Sri Lanka was in the spotlight at ITB Berlin, the world’s largest travel trade show, which is attended by over 10,000 exhibitors and over 120,000 trade visitors from across the globe. The case study of Cinnamon TBCasia took centre-stage as the first travel bloggers’ conference of its kind to be conducted in Asia, effectively bringing travel bloggers together to create engaging written and visual content about Sri Lanka, which exponentially enhanced the country’s online presence.
Invited to speak at the eTravel World Forum at ITB, a platform that engages audiences and updates them on the best practices of digital and online marketing, were Dileep Mudadeniya, Head of Brand Marketing – Cinnamon Hotels and Resorts and Vice President John Keells Group and Matt Gibson, President of the Professional Travel Bloggers’ Association (PTBA), who presented the case study on the theme, Co-operating with Bloggers for Place and Product Marketing, according to a Cinnamon Hotels media release.
Mr. Gibson presented an overview of TBCasia, and explained how emerging destinations benefit from working with travel bloggers. He emphasised how new or unknown places are suffering from the lack of digital online assets, optimisation on search engines, endorsements and referrals. He reiterated that travel blogging is an effective tool and mechanism that can be used as an alternative to traditional destination promotion tactics.
Commenting on the Cinnamon TBCasia case study, Mr. Mudadeniya stated: “Cinnamon TBCasia was part of an innovative destination marketing initiative that attracted international travel bloggers to the Asian continent on a large scale. Through the immense influence and reach that these bloggers had on their online forums and platforms, we were able to rapidly increase awareness about Sri Lanka as a top travel destination. The initiative generated over 56,500,000 Twitter and Instagram impressions, over 230,000 Instagram engagements as well as a multitude of posts, vlogs, blogs and videos about the island.”
He said that the most important aspect of Cinnamon TBCasia is how the platform helped to place unknown or lesser known destinations in Sri Lanka on the map. Places in the North and East of the country in particular received immense online exposure through the social media promotions and blogging activities that were conducted throughout the campaign.