On January 30, the Wellton Riverside SPA Hotel hosted the Business Forum of the International Travel Trade Fair “Balttour 2019”, which brought together 145 tourism professionals from across Latvia. During the forum, tourism professionals had an opportunity to find out about various challenges of digitalisation in today’s travel marketing, the most common stumbling blocks and a range of possible solutions.
The specialists of the “Infinitum” digital marketing agency, Kristiāns Patmalnieks, Laura Celmāra, Jānis Birģelis and Irbe Katrīna Zolneroviča, introduced the audience to the current trends in social media, advertising and website usage. Useful knowledge on how to trust partners and customers by assessing their financial security was provided by Intars Miķelsons, Commercial Director at Kredītinformācijas Birojs.
Kristīne Rasnača, an executive director and strategist at the New Black Media Agency, offered exciting content about millennials or the millennial generation ‒ their characteristics and effective ways to approach this generation regarding the tourism industry. This lecture was developed for the Balttour Forum by the well-known social media guru Artūrs Mednis.
So as to enable regional tourism organisers to attract tourists from different cities of Latvia, Ēriks Lingebērziņš, Associate Professor at Turība University, manager of the Tourism Research Centre, CEO at Balticvision Riga, presented the results of an ambitious study on the travelling habits of residents of the large cities of Latvia and the general trends of domestic tourism.
Sanda Teihmane, Baltic marketing and product manager at Latvia's national airline “airBaltic”, on turn, unveiled new destinations for the summer 2019 – Stuttgart (Germany) and Lviv (Ukraine). “airBaltic” also treated the visitors of the Forum with country-specific refreshments.
