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July 13, 2012
Virtual marketing of holy city
I Travel Jerusalem claims to be the one-stop site for visits.
ARIEH O’SULLIVAN THE MEDIA LINE
In June, Jerusalem launched a new website and started dispersing information kiosks called Info Stands aimed at consolidating all tourism information about the holy city into one virtual location.
Mayor Nir Barkat said he was confident that the new endeavor, which can be found at itraveljerusalem.com, would help reach the goal of bringing 10 million tourists to Jerusalem every year. A mayor who has sought to present an image of enormous energy and bullish reform since he was elected four years ago, Barkat has seen tourism to the city grow from fewer than two million tourists to a record 3.5 million last year.
“This city is not just about religion and politics but [it’s] also an urban cultural centre,” Barkat said at the launch of itraveljerusalem.com, adding that he believed “half the world wants to come here. There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing a vision incarnated, and today is another step in that.”
The Jerusalem municipality, through the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA), has injected some NIS 2 million (about $515,000 Cdn) into the development of the site, aimed at slashing red tape and offering incoming tourists the best deals and the widest range of opportunities to visit Jerusalem from all corners of the globe, said Ilanit Melchior, tourism director of the JDA.
At press time, nine Info Stands were being placed at various hotels across the city and, within the next couple of months, another 36 are to be set up at venues ranging from inexpensive hostels to five-star hotels, in order to reach a diversity of tourists.
“As an official site, the data is reliable,” Melchior added for those curious about how it stacked up to other sites offering travel information. Indeed, the company Ben Ben Group, which won the tender to develop and run the site, has its staff inputting data around the clock. The site, which is simple to interface and can be used on a smartphone, allows access to information on everything from the nearest kosher restaurant to tickets to the latest rock concert or museum event, and hotel accommodations.
There is also a Google Street-view map of various sites in the city and the de rigueur schedule of nightlife, shopping locations and an events calendar, and the site will host HD videos of the city. The Info Stands are also programmed to recommend places in their vicinity, which can make them more useful than someone surfing the online site from home.
The site currently is only available in English and Hebrew, but it is expected to add Arabic, Russian, Italian, German and Spanish in the near future.
“The foreign media does a bad job for Jerusalem,” said Amos Fridlin, head of marketing for Ben Ben Group. “In the best case, when foreigners hear the world Jerusalem, they think of camels and churches and, in the worst case, bombs and terrorist attacks.”
“The launch … is a whole strategic concept to link the city with the tourists and make it easier to interact with the city,” Fridlin said.
In order to make the city more vibrant, visitors are encouraged to leave reviews and recommendations on the site, much similar to popular tourism websites like TripAdvisor. Fridlin said he expects traffic to reach 300,000 hits.
According to official figures, more than 80 percent of all visitors to Israel come to Jerusalem.
In the last three years there has been a cultural and sports revolution in Jerusalem, culture budgets were doubled and the number of arts and culture events and festivals in the city has tripled. Still, Jerusalem is vulnerable to steep drops in tourism whenever waves of unrest and fighting engulf the city of some 910,000 residents, about one-third of whom are not Jewish. Jerusalem, which is more than 3,000 years old, was recently selected as one of TripAdvisor’s top 25 most sought-after destinations.
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