The best stats you´ve ever seen

Sometimes some facts & figures can change your view of the world… Tourism development  is often seen as a sustainable way out of poverty. This week Natural is educating 143 tour operators from 28 developing countries on the Scandinavian tourism market under the flag of CBI´s Export Coaching Program in Rotterdam.
Enjoy Hans Rosling´s inspirational speech at [...]

Wind power vs tourism employees in Sweden

Sources: Swedish Energy Agency & Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth

Sweden cheaper than ever

Being a tourist in Sweden is cheaper than in ages. A hundred swedish kronor is equivalent to USD 12,16, EUR 9,03 or GBP 8,45 today. It´s a 40% drop in value of the swedish currency since april 2008. This means business for incoming tour operators and overseas agents. However, Riksbanken (the Central Bank) says it´s [...]

Investment boom in tourism

Recession times are investment times, an old friend said to me a while ago. It seems to be true, at least within tourism. Huge amounts are invested in tourism these days and there´s more to come.
As an industry, tourism is different from other markets. Tourism requires more cooperation between
suppliers to put together packages to a total [...]

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 [...]

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 or [...]

Sometimes the road less travelled is less travelled for a reason

Recently the Swedish government presented the budget proposition for next year. VisitSweden got a raise by SEK 10M (~ USD 1,4M) for marketing purposes, which is a drop in the ocean considering that foreign tourists 2007 added a net of SEK 12 BILLIONS (~USD1,7 Bn) to the Swedish economy in VAT only. Talk about “buying [...]

10 secrets to tourism success

Tourism is an amazing industry. Someone has described it as the best product in the world: the customer arrives, empties his wallet and returns back home. Properly managed, tourism is a sustainable, profitable and very rewarding industry for any society. How come then, parts of it are fragmented with low margains? Well, from my point [...]

It´s like chinese to me

There are about 1,3 billion Chinese people in China, approximately a quarter of the world’s total population. Chinese economy is doing quite well while Europe’s and the United States economy is struggling to get back on their feet.
China has recently eased on travel regulations and visa application procedures for their citizens, which have resulted in [...]