Skift Take

Abu Dhabi is a perfect case study of the benefits, and frankly the necessity, of taking outdated tourism information into today’s global digital content world, one that the industry is slowing adapting to.

Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority’s (TCA Abu Dhabi) web portal, visitabudhabi.ae, has received in excess of 1.3 million visitors since its re-launch last year, a 27% increase in traffic in 2012 compared with 2011.

The website attracted 21% more new visitors and 47% more page views, while the average visit duration rose 34%.

The site also generated more than 69,000 hotel searches with the number of leads to online travel agents (OTAs) and hotel booking engines reaching over 16,900, with a conversion rate of almost a quarter.

In addition, restaurants searches on the site came in at more than 115,000 while 2000 flights were searched generating 431 OTA and airline leads, while 126 car searches were logged.

Meanwhile, Visitabudhabi.ae went social in September 2012 and has since  reached a Facebook audience of more than 19 million, generating more than 147,883 likes, posts, comments and shares.

By focusing on a multiple-tier digital and social media campaign including pre-event promotions, post event sharing, destination presentation, celebrity tie-ins and competitions, visitabudhabi.ae reached a total Facebook fan base of about 90,000 and its target of 30,000 Twitter followers by the end of 2012.

The destination website’s re-launch involved significant content upgrades including 3000 new images, and 150,000 newly-written pieces of content available in eight languages including English, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese and Chinese.

© 2012 ITP Business Publishing Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company

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Tags: abu dhabi, social media

Photo credit: Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority's web portal, visitabudhabi.ae.

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