New tools of the trade

How do you make cash out of a ”virtual tourist”? You turn them into real ones. There is a wide range of free, hands-on tools you can use to visualize how an experience at your place would be long before your potential guest has actually thought of travelling somewhere. Long gone are the times when [...]

Lost in translation ?

Suppose you´re hungry. You stroll down to your favourite restaurant back home in Ohio, Shanghai, Barranquilla or wherever you happens to live. You find a smorgasbord of mouth-watering seafood offered on the menue. One of them is, say, kräftor med vitlökssmör och ostpaj. Would you order it? Didn´t think so. Well, actually it´s a delicacy [...]

Investment opportunities in Swedish tourism

Swedish tourism is boosting. Despite that most of Sweden´s tourism attractions are yet to be discovered by people abroad, the tourism export value now outperforms that of Swedens total export. One can only imagine how rapidly it will grow with an improved service & quality level when the marketing efforts from VisitSweden, Invest in Sweden [...]

Snowolverine – Touring in a winter wilderness

Sweden is a vast country, most of it covered by snow 6-9 months a year. Winter tourism is a billion-dollar industry here. Alpine- & cross country skiing, speed skating, samí reindeer tours or relaxing SPA´s with sauna and snow-bathing are some of the winter activites that fascinates visitors from all over the world. The deep [...]

Where have all the fun dudes gone?

I´m not really a fan of role models. Nonetheless, a whole industry has sprung up relating to  behavior profiling. Recruitment firms, job centres and human resource departments use test results as an undisputable truth to separate the sheep from the goats. I´ve held a number of management positions during the major part of my working [...]

Running tour operations in times of recession

So it´s not really business as usual nowadays? You´ve got some cancellations? Media are flooding us with bad economy news at the moment. Even though not much has yet actually happened that affect peoples life in reality, there´s a sense of urgency in the air. Keep smilin´ and be pro-active! There´s a lot you can [...]

How about dating a dolphin?

Are your marketing costs sky-rocketing? Spending a fortune on ads and brochures? Let me tell you about one of the best marketing tools I´ve ever stumbled upon. No, it´s not one of  those pyramid-multi-level-marketing things. This one is for real. And I´m not paid to write this. It allows you to communicate exclusively with people [...]

Tough times: Put the money where the mouth is

The ongoing financial crisis dominates Swedish media these days. From my point of view, it doesn´t come as a surprise. We have a proud tradition as an industrial nation based on international top brands like Ericsson, Volvo, ABB, Electrolux and other manufacturing corporations. They have relocated a lot of their production to Asia the last years [...]

Export coaching programme tourism

CBI, Centre for the promotion of imports from developing countries, launches its second export coaching programmme for tourism businesses that wants to expand to Sweden and Europe. Their first programme was a success that resulted in 45 companies closing business deals worth € 8 Million (~US$11,7 Million). If you are running an incoming tourism business [...]

Too many chiefs and not enough Indians?

Tourism marketing is a tricky thing. At least in Sweden. Our tourism industry is based on about 7000 small tourism enterprises, still waiting to be discovered by the masses… Most of them are not even small, but micro-companies with one or a just few employees. There are of course a number of larger tourismrelated corporations, [...]