50 IN PERSON
bermuda tourism authority
A conversation with... Bill Hanbury
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Bermuda Tourism Authority
“We have been spending up to $400,000 dollars a year in the UK market, but we are going to double or triple that in the next year or so”
Tell us about your previous roles in travel? I’ve been rebuilding destination brands for over 30 years and ran the Syracuse CVB, the Buffalo CVB, the Milwaukee CVB and the CVB in Washington DC.
Did the transition earlier this year from the Department of Tourism to the Bermuda Tourism Authority go smoothly? It did. We are a new entity and now completely out of government. We created a new team and are off to a good start. You would think that with a brand-new entity there would be a lot of early challenges but everything was very well planned and the transition has gone smoothly.
The new BTA is a ‘non-political’ body but have you managed to take the politics out of tourism in Bermuda? I think we are building an
organisation to last and one that will address a lot of those challenges the politicians are interested in. Will politicians and politics ever be totally out of the equation? Probably not, but we are trying to minimalise their involvement. Politicians need quick fi xes and in the past tourism has invested in short-term projects. We have done things on the fl y as a response to political pressures. But that is no way to run an army! Now we are focused on long-term investments and building brands.
Is there a sense that, with the new BTA, tourism on the island is at the start of a new ‘journey’? In a way, yes. Bermuda was once one of the pre-eminent tourism destinations in the world. In the 1950s and 1960s if you were thinking about a luxury destination Bermuda was going to be number one on the list. It's not today, yet we still have the same beaches, the same
magnifi cent fl ora and fauna, the same top golf courses. So I think we can get back there.
What are your main challenges? There are several. Occupancy and seasonality is one. We get excellent visitor numbers in June, July and August but we
need to get people on
the island year round. We take a really signifi cant dip in December, January and February, November and March are also not great. In times gone by those months had decent visitor numbers, but not now.
Beyond the beaches does Bermuda have the right line-up of attractions to attract people year round? Absolutely, but this is something that we have not not been very good at conveying. For example, we have a terrifi c marine and nautical environment. You can fi sh, scuba dive, enjoy our walking trails, discover deserted beaches, go bird watching, go sailing or even kite surf. These are all interesting things that you can do year round – and I can promise you the weather in Bermuda 'off season' in January and February is a heck of a lot better than it is in London!
Do you have any specifi c targets in terms of visitor numbers? We do. The target we have been given is a million air arrivals over the next six years – that’s about a 40% increase between now and 2020. That is a very big and aggressive number. We also want to create 2,200 new jobs in tourism and we want to better balance cruise line visitors with airline visitors as those numbers are way out of whack: over 60% of all our visitors are now arriving on cruise ships and we want to reverse that.
Why does Bermuda play down its British roots and is this an area that
www.sellinglonghaul.com
could be better developed? Bermuda has just not done a good job at pushing any of its brands in the UK. Brits just don’t ‘understand Bermuda and we have rarely celebrated our connections to Britain. I think it is important Bermuda embraces and shows off its British heritage; after all, many of our antiquities on the ground – our forts, our roads, our ports and much of our infrastructure – are British built. I think we should celebrate this, not distance ourselves from it for fear of being seen as some kind of colony.
Some other destinations are chasing ‘new markets’…Is Bermuda still committed to the UK? Absolutely! We have been spending up to $400,000 dollars a year in the UK, all in, but we are going to double or triple that in the next year. That is how important we think the market is. On the travel trade side, our intention is to invest in more partnerships. For 2012/13 UK visitor numbers were up around 12.3%. We are slightly up again this year and are looking to achieve a more signifi cant increase by the end of 2014.
What is your overall budget for marketing? We have $26.3 million of government support. This is accrued from tax revenues.
Top: The Reefs, an oceanfront resort; inset: Rosedon, a boutique hotel set in lush gardens in Hamilton; left: dunking of 'the gossiping wench' in St. George's
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72