Expedia

OVER $17 MILLION TURNOVER GENERATED BY ON LINE BOOKING IN 10 MONTHS

During an upbeat press conference held on the 4 December, at the San Gorg Corinthia, Mr Diego Lofeudo regional Director of Expedia.com, the on-line booking service provider, divulged a good number of facts and figures related to the success story of the Malta Tourism Authority’s marketing campaign on Expedia in the past year..

Expedia calls the MTA e-pioneers, as it was the first Tourism board to market their destination through the largest e-portal available, with the investment having most certainly paid dividends. The success of the MTA’s campaign is so remarkable that Malta is used as a case study to show other countries the selling power Expedia has. From a nominal $200,000 spent on Malta’s campaign, an additional $7.5 million turnover was generated for the Maltese Tourism Industry, $3 million of which are in additional local spend.

Around 75 million people visit Expedia websites every month and for Malta this has been translated into 80.500 room nights sold so far in 2007 and a total of $17 million general turnover from air, hotel, car rental and tours, a remarkable increase of $7.5 million as previously stated in just 10 months. This staggering figure does not include money spent in the destination by Expedia customers.

The above results prove that the MTA’s marketing strategy is doing it’s work and that the Malta Tourism Authority is not only abreast of the International trends, but in such cases also well ahead. Carlo Micallef, Head Tour Operating and Leisure within the MTA said that, “Our marketing of Malta as a destination on Expedia has certainly paid off. The fact that the MTA was the first National Tourism Office to do this, on the world’s largest on-line booking portal, also bears witness to the fact that Malta is at the cutting edge of new and alternative marketing strategies. We have no doubt that the success being generated through the campaign on Expedia will continue in the coming months, and even grow, due to the fact that our campaign has now been extended to new markets such as Scandinavia, the USA and Spain, apart from the original UK, Italy, Germany and France.