Case of responsible tourism and stakeholder management: Inspired by Iceland
Inga Hlín Pálsdóttir is works as Director at Promote Iceland.
To ensure sustainable growth for tourism in Iceland, Promote Iceland has embraced a responsible marketing approach, highlighting not only what can be enjoyed in Iceland, but also how it should be enjoyed in a sustainable manner. This approach is an attempt to affect visitor behavior in order to allow the tourism sector to grow and flourish in harmony with both nature and society, and give visitors an authentic, sustainable and responsible experience that benefit the visitor as well as locals.
In 2019 Promote Iceland has been working on a new strategy for marketing and export of Iceland. A new marketing and export council has been called to life, consisting of about 40 people from the public and private sectors. They launched the strategy in the middle of October 2019 and will be implementing it from there on. Six areas have been prioritised – one of them is tourism. At the same time the government launched a new framework on tourism until 2030 in co-operation with the industry. An action plan will be ready in 2020.
In both of those initiatives sustainability and responsibility is the key message and will be integrated together. It will be made a horisontal theme and checked against delivery, to really create a change.
“Inspired by Iceland”
In the marketing strategy for tourism, sustainability and responsibility have been at the core of Promote Iceland’s work for the last few years. While these keywords feature in many organisations and places around the world, Iceland has done an outstanding job. It is a key feature under the brand Inspired by Iceland. They have launched three marketing initiatives around this issue and you can find at: https://www.inspiredbyiceland.com/
1) Iceland Academy, an educational tool for how to travel responsibly in Iceland
2) The Iceland Pledge, where they ask tourists to pledge that they will be responsible while travelling in Iceland
3) Kranavatn campaign in 2019, where they encourage travellers to drink water straight from the tap. (Kranavatn means tap water.)
All of these have created a lot of interest and the Icelandic Pledge has been copied in other countries e.g New Zealand and Hawaii.
Inga will talk about how to go beyond words like “sustainability” and create a stakeholder as well as marketing impact with responsible tourism