Trinidad & Tobago Tourist Board

The Trinidad and Tobago Tourist Board commissioned Travelscape to conduct research relating to awareness and knowledge of the Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) brand among the UK travel trade. The research outcomes will aid the development of benchmarking against year on year activity. The research consisted of two strands each with a separate target group. The first being UK Tour Operators, the second being travel agents. Respondents amongst the travel agent target group consisted of a representative sample of multiple high street travel retailers, independent travel retailer, homeworkers and call centres. We ensured that respondents had no current affiliations to either the Trinidad & Tobago Tourist Board or the Caribbean Tourist Board.

The first strand of our work was to assess and measure the role of the Tourist Office in supporting Tour Operators’ ex UK programmes to Trinidad and Tobago. Specifically the research sought to interview Tour Operators both familiar and unfamiliar with Trinidad and Tobago and assessed the following elements:

Awareness – Familiarity – Favourability – Perceptions – Recommendation – Advocacy - Propensity to book - Recall of marketing campaigns

An in-depth, qualitative telephone survey of Tour Operators, drawing on Travelscape’s own database, was undertaken. The survey targeted senior personnel within Tour Operators’ organisations; specifically, these included Sales and Marketing Directors, Commercial Directors and Product Managers. The second strand of our work examined similar areas to the former strand but this time using an online survey. We were able to quantify our results into six areas and address issues of ‘invisibility’.

• Identifying key stakeholders in the decision making process
• Identifying key selling influencing factors
• Perceptions of the product and product mix
• The perceived role of the T&T UK Office
• Recall of marketing activity
• Comparison of the T&T UK Tourist Office with other tourist board organisations

We examined recommendations to:

• Increase marketing support for Tour Operators
• Increase provision of online and offline training for Tour Operators
• Increase presence at trade and consumer events