JORDAN: Promoting Biblical Sites

Although present in India for some years now, Jordan had barely shown any noticeable enthusiasm for the Indian market until recently. However, it suddenly seems to be pouring much more in terms of its marketing effort in India, visible through extensive media coverages, advertisements and strategically engaging the all important travel trade.

Today JTB’s (Jordan Tourism Bureau) marketing activities in India include Jordan video clips being played out at PVR Cinemas in Delhi & Mumbai, an online campaign with Yahoo!, trade and media FAM trips and many other marketing activities that will be rolled out during the rest of the year. In conversation with Aviation Herald, Ashit Taneja, Country Manager, Jordan Tourism Board, India Office, talks about the strategic direction that Jordan Tourism Bureau plans to take in the Indian market.

The Indian market is extremely important for Jordan as there is tremendous scope to increase the Indian arrivals into Jordan. Jordan has a lot to offer in terms of historic sites, wellness, culture, religious, and leisure options. Q- How does JTB view India market? JTB will target the Indian leisure and MICE segments along with religious travellers so that they can experience the prominent Biblical sites Jordan boasts of.

The strategy is to focus on marketing, media and sales activities that will be aimed at travel agents, media and the consumer to promote Jordan as a diverse tourist destina- tion. The initial focus cities for these activities are Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. Further along the year, JTB plans to have stronger presence across Tier II cities in India.JTB will also launch the Jordan Specialist Online Programme for travel agents to generate destination exclusive experts and to increase the knowledge about Jordan among travel agents.

This will enable the agents to draw up itineraries and give appropriate advice to travelers who are looking at Jordan as a destination. The travel trade is the key to success for a destination as they are the experts to advice, convince and finally draw up packages for the travellers. Therefore to ensure that the travel trade is well educated about Jordan we are conducting FAM trips, sales calls in tier II cities and plan to conduct a 4-city road show before the start of the next travel season along with Jordan Specialist program.

We plan to become more aggressive in India to ensure that Jordan as a destination has a top of the mind recall among the trade. Moreover, at the same time the focus is also to educate the consumer market and carve a niche for Jordan. The budget has been fairly distributed among the trade and consumer activities to ensure we have year round presence. Q- How does the Indian travel trade figure in your destination marketing programmes? Q- What kind of investment are you making in India?