Tourist Board restructures US Sales Offices

The BVI Tourist Board is phasing out its Atlanta office in a move to restructure its North American sales offices.

BVITB Director Mr. Kedrick Malone said the decision was taken to strengthen the sales operations to create a more effective sales force to better capitalize on the advertising dollar the BVI spends in the U.S market.
The Board has three offices in the U.S. in New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta. The Atlanta office, essentially the operations base for the Board, will be phased out, retaining the east coast in New York and the west coast office in Los Angeles. The coastal offices are responsible for not just being an operations base, but for collecting consumer information, maintaining the BVI data base, providing collateral material and sending information out to consumers and coordinating the territory’s presence at trade shows.

From three regions, the Board has now created six sales regions in the United States. New York and Los Angeles will remain; the Atlanta region will be covered by an Atlanta sales rep working out of their home; a sales person will be added to the Washington D.C. area, a major market for the BVI; a rep to Chicago to cover the mid west region, another major market and one to Dallas to cover the southwest region of the United States.
“Again, what this does is it gives us more sales regions and more people out in the field, complimenting the strategy in place for the sales regions,” Mr. Malone indicated. He said the concept of working from home as a sales rep is more cost effective and is in keeping with what other destinations are doing in order to be more effective and competitive.

In addition to restructuring the physical offices, the Board has also implemented a number of measures within the various offices and field representatives. He said they are developing a much stronger relationship marketing programme where the sales managers will be working closer with tour operators, travel agents, industry partners and also with the consumer trade.

“We’re also becoming more targeted in our sales efforts,” the Director stated. He said instead of attending a lot of trade shows, they would spend more time interacting with industry partners.

The sales offices would also have a more integrated approach, from independent entities to now working more directly with the agencies, the BVI office and industry partners in the United States.

Mr. Malone reiterated that these measures to improve the planning and control of the sales offices are intended to ensure that the BVI is more effective in the major U.S. market, to get greater value for money.
Another aspect of the programme includes staff training to strengthen the ability of sales persons to not only sell the product but also improve their presentation techniques and sales tools.

The plan also includes working closer with field reps of the BVI hotels and charter companies doing joint sales calls; implementing a series of brochures where the BVI reps would go from city to city meeting with travel agents and tour operators selling the territory and adding a listing to the website (www.bvitouristboard.com) where a potential visitor would be able to go to a particular travel agent for more information.

“Additionally, another key area that we’re focusing on is developing our airline relationships,” the Tourist Board Director outlined. He said they realize that in the travel trade, airline access is a key decision for a traveler in terms of what destination they go to.

The BVI Tourist Board official said they are developing a relationship with the major airlines coming into San Juan, Puerto Rico and St. Thomas to better understand how they develop their routing plans and try to find out when they would be running specials on various locations, in an effort to work in concert with them to capitalize on the consumer’s interest in travelling to a particular destination.

He said they would also be implementing tele-marketing programmes.