Hotels owners and Air Seychelles officials recently met with representatives of overseas destination management companies (DMC) and tried to map out strategies to jointly market Seychelles abroad.

"We want to let people know about Seychelles in the most cost-effective way," Amia Jovanovic-Desir of Seychelles Tourism Marketing Authority (STMA) said at The Wharf Resort where the consultations were held.

She said STMA had brought the players together so that they could see how to share advertising costs, and also to evaluate which methods had borne fruit in the past and which ones did little to boost tourism.

"We should obviously go more for the effective ways and avoid those which are not effective," she said, adding that whereas well-established DMCs could easily advertise the destination, smaller ones would find the cost of doing so prohibitive, yet if they joined hands with other interested parties they could achieve the same goals.

Linda Kemp from the Seychelles tourism office agreed with Ms Jovanovic-Desir that representatives of the Seychelles market overseas often found themselves at a dead end when potential clients sought to know more about these islands, if the officials had not been here before.

"Hence we are trying to encourage hoteliers to join hands with Air Seychelles and STMA to see how we can bring more of our representatives overseas to Seychelles," Jovanovic-Desir said.

To map out the strategies, DMC officials from different European and Middle East markets met in groups with STMA and Air Seychelles representatives during the one-day exercise.

Chief Executive Officer Francis Savy of STMA said that the meeting was part of the implementation of what the players in tourism decided upon when they met on Alphonse Island Resort recently.

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