Fiji promotion must continue: A-G

PRESS RELEASE

Fiji promotion must continue: A-G

There is a need to continuously promote Fiji in different and new ways, says Attorney-General and Minister for Tourism, Mr Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum.

He made the comments following the release of provisional visitor arrival figures by the Bureau of Statistics, which showed a growth of 37.6% in January this year compared to the same period last year.

Mr Sayed-Khaiyum said that the trick was not to “rest on our laurels” because it was the first month of the year.

He said that the usage of internet was important.

“The facilitation of promotion through various new means, various media outlets that we have not used before needs to be continued and we need to be a lot more strategic in terms of our marketing and targeting those market-driven promotion that we usually engage in and we need to obviously think outside the box,” Mr Sayed-Khaiyum said.

The Attorney-General said that whilst the statistics may very good there was a need to maintain that consistency.

He said that from an overall tourism perspective the tourism dollar had to be spread out more throughout the economy.

“We want the tourist dollar to stay within Fiji and as you know Government has provided new initiatives such as the extension of liquor trading hours, extension of shopping hours - those sorts of initiatives assist in terms of ensuring that there is a lot more dollar spin-offs from the tourist that comes to Fiji. We must take advantage of the multiplier effect of tourism.”

Provisional visitor arrivals figures released showed that Australia had the highest increase of 65.2% for the month of January this year compared to the same period last year followed by New Zealand with 49.8% and European countries with 22%.

Brenda Ragi
Media Liaison Officer
Attorney-General’s Chambers

3 March 2010

ENDS