Toulipan an Italian project for digital tourist networks’ marketing and communication
During the fourth BTO (Buy Tourism Online), a digital tourism fair held last December 2011 in Florence, the marketing and communication company Resolvis, based in Matera, Basilicata, introduced Toulipan (www.toulipan.it/en), its new programme for local tourist networks’ digital marketing.
Its bringing to market took place within the programme “Internet Better Tourism” by Toscana Promozione. ToulipanTM – acronym for TOUrist Local Integrated Area Network – is devoted to all those public and private organisations aiming at promoting a region considered as a set of tourist resources, products and services and their interrelated events, all being part of a single “umbrella brand”: APTs (regional tourist offices), area promotion companies (private tourism marketing agencies), consorzi and distretti turistici (tourist enterprise partnerships), convention bureaux, just to mention a few.
With the new digital integrated system for tourism marketing and communication, Toulipan’s work team, together with tourist networks’ overseers, defines the main guidelines for a strategic planning, giving birth to a series of multimedia contents to be addressed to the greatest number of stakeholders involved in tourism industry: accommodation facilities, restaurateurs, dealers, craftsmen, tour guides, event organisers. Toulipan provides all these stakeholders with a series of new and effective tools to be used when coming into contact with real or potential markets.
Marketing and communication activities in tourism, even though they are developed correctly at a central level, they often cannot reach peripheral units; the relationships between these entities are often irregular even though they would all benefit from a wider distribution of local information. What usually happens can be defined as a “parochialism” of tourist attractions, according to which each entity tries to bring grist to its mill, taking no interest in wider purposes defined by higher-level organisations. Even those events specifically organised to stimulate tourist attractions’ fruition, are likely to become a waste of money if not supported by a widespread and regular ballyhoo.
However, Toulipan’s innovation consists in the possibility of extending digital networks’ advantages to those stakeholders who, for their dimensions, possibilities and vocation, have a low visibility on the web; the programme offers them both ordinary tools to introduce tourist attractions (contacts, maps, tariffs, photo and video galleries, e-commerce, etc.) and new informative and marketing contents arising from a strategic analysis of tourist networks. These websites are affordable and allow a tourist attraction potential to be enlarged to all those entities operating under the same umbrella brand: a region’s appeal no longer depends on the best developed websites, but it is uniform within the whole network, on every operator’s website; the qualitative level of the services provided is regular and certified in advance, without any risk of misinformation caused by the use of limited resources or by the absence of a shared project.
The contents to be distributed are of different nature: news to communicate upcoming events, weather reports, public services, videos and photos, information sheets about the resources of the cultural, socio-anthropological, architectural, archaeological, historical, environmental and artistic heritage of a given context. All these pieces of information are intelligible and easy to use even by non expert users.
Toulipan will help national and foreign tourist networks standardize communication and marketing processes, producing useful economies of scale and a higher level of visibility in the reference dynamic market (see www.toulipan.it/en).
English Video on Youtube: http://youtu.be/tcTGyD4zvYM
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