Can we reinvent Cyprus Tourism?
The British Tourism Office has launched its new campaign “Cities” promoting 10 cities in the UK . Objective is to attract City lovers to Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle-Gateshead and Oxford where the traveler will be able to experience what those places have to offer.
Perhaps Cyprus from a City Break point of view has some handicaps . The size of the cities, their city plans, the flight time from the soured markets and the dependence on private transport are factors that need to be taken into account the time we plan a new tourist product.
Our suggestion is use the British “Cities” program and see how we could learn from it and create a new Product – Service adapted to the Cypriot reality.
In our opinion there is a niche market which if is cultivated adequately we could reinvent tourism in Cyprus. Our proposal is to create a product based on 4 fundamental pillars. Tradition, Gastronomy, Culture and Experience. All these elements could create an Authentic Package without any “made up ingredients” and be adapted to certain regions in different times of the year in order to minimize seasonality.
The main idea is to collaborate with the locals and regenerate traditional jobs- occupations in their original format, bring back the “old gastronomy” including cooking methods, ingredients and seasonality of food and wine. Combine them with the cultural effect and connotations those elements had and still have in the Cypriot people. Here we need to underline the influences Cyprus received from the different cultures that passed from here in history, and how these cultures are now part of us. All these well designed and packaged would turn the traveler from a simple visitor-audience to an active participator. Turn visiting into an experience; make the visitor part of the activity so as to feel Cyprus naturally on his/her “skin”.
This should be coordinated with many other elements such as: low cost flights, public transportation (to move from village to village), accommodation facilities (agro tourism establishments already exist and they are perfect for such a product) and local collaboration and compromise by the inhabitants of the villages.
With an initiative like this, we guarantee sustainability in the tourism activity, high levels of local participation, improvement of the seasonality and regional tourism development without the need of investing in huge tourism infrastructure. Create a new model of collaboration which will give to the users value for money and to the suppliers decent ROI.
Anyway those are ideas, ideas that do not need complex political decisions, ideas that can be implemented regionally, but still the collaboration of the state is needed as well as the sincere and long term collaboration of the two airlines in Cyprus.