Behind the Scenes of Switzerland Tourism with Markus Tschannen (#09)
Episode Summary: Discovering Swiss Tourism Strategies
In this episode, I sit down with Markus Tschannen, spokesperson for Switzerland Tourism to explore the inner workings of Switzerland’s tourism industry. We discuss the various strategies and campaigns aimed at attracting tourists from different regions, and how the demographic of travellers to Switzerland is evolving. Markus also shares insights on what younger generations, like Gen Z, prioritize when visiting Switzerland and how that’s shaping the future of tourism.
Expect to learn about the latest trends in travel, interesting statistics on tourists in Switzerland, how lesser-known regions in Switzerland are being promoted, how Switzerland selects its public figures as ambassadors and, of course, the iconic ad campaigns featuring Roger Federer and Hollywood stars. Enjoy!
About Markus Tschannen: Shaping the Future of Swiss Tourism
Markus Tschannen is an official spokesperson for Switzerland Tourism, driving efforts to showcase the country’s beauty, culture, and diversity to a global audience. Understanding tourism trends and marketing, Markus has a key role in crafting campaigns that resonate with modern travellers. His work bridges traditional Swiss charm with innovative approaches to tourism promotion.
Full Transcript
Dive into the complete conversation with Markus Tschannen as we discuss the art of attracting tourists to Switzerland, from promoting hidden gems to adapting to modern travel trends. This transcript offers a comprehensive look into the strategies and stories behind Switzerland Tourism.
Mike: [00:00:00] Markus, thank you very much for joining me today. How are you?
Markus: Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. I’m fine. I’m fine. Nice weather outside. I’m looking forward to this.
Mike: I watched the new ad campaign or the new commercial that came out a week ago or two weeks ago with Roger Federer and Mads Mikkelsen. And I thought, yeah, what goes into these commercials? I feel like they’re becoming quite iconic. I was checking before this podcast and a couple of the older ones with Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro have over a hundred million views now. What goes into a campaign like this?
Markus: Definitely a lot of work. Also some money. Not just for the actors. One would think the actors are very expensive. They’re actually not all that expensive. Obviously not talk about the numbers as those are. Like confidential confidentiality contracts but playing them out, these advertisings on YouTube and social media.
And [00:01:00] that’s where a lot of the budget goes. And it’s a lot of work not just like Dealing with the persons and their managements and the film set things, the planning, and We’re pretty proud on these commercials, actually, because I think they’re funny, they’re they reach an audience that likes them, and we’ll prepare extra diligently that they make sure they are good at the end.
So there’s a lot of work.
Mike: You’re lucky that you have one of the most beloved sports players of all time happy to be involved. That’s got to make things a little bit easier.
Markus: Yeah, it’s pretty much a no brainer to work with Roger Federer which is our only actually our only global ambassador that we have.
We have those like market ambassadors, but Roger Federer is the only person we consistently work with on the global level. Yeah.
Mike: Can you tell me a little bit about the types of tourists that visit Switzerland and whether [00:02:00] the demographic has changed over the years.
Markus: Yeah, I’ll try to. First of all, there’s not the one typical guest of course but we do have segments naturally.
First of all, like by origin we differentiate between three different types of markets, the domestic market. So like most people that visit Switzerland. Come from Switzerland that just traveled their own country. That’s about them about half at the moment. And then we have the short haul markets.
That’s basically Europe, especially neighboring countries like Germany, France, Italy, Austria. And we have the long haul markets that would then be what do you expect them to be? Of course Australia, of course Asia the Americas, we do not currently work or are not operational in Africa, [00:03:00] but yeah, those are like the market distributions.
And there are differences, of course, because especially the closer markets there we have very loyal guests that come often and come repeatedly, maybe even their parents came to Switzerland yearly. So we did a study. Or we’d be doing this study regularly, but it’s just basically asking people on the street different questions.
And one question is how many times have you visited Switzerland before? And it’s like two thirds of people answered that they’ve visited Switzerland more than five times and about 16% are visiting Switzerland from the first time. If you just ask at the moment, ask people on the street, how many times have you visited Switzerland?
It’s 16 percent that they’re visiting.
Mike: When you’re saying, asking these people on the street, is this in China, the US, Australia? No, this
Markus: is in Switzerland. We are asking tourists in Switzerland. Or also we [00:04:00] have some like data and think that we get, so we can ask them afterwards, but it’s it’s like, Asking people in switzerland why they came here and then the the likes and Yeah, obviously people from long haul markets don’t visit as often like when you travel from the us You most of them don’t come every year so there’s a difference a differentiation and we have like segmentations by type of travelers.
I don’t know how much you’re interested in numbers, but I can maybe say that, like in these segmentations, there’s like the type, there are three types, like the nature lover, the snow sports enthusiast, and the outdoor enthusiast that make up more than 60 percent of the guests in the, we have very different segments, like the city breaker or the spa guest or luxury travelers, but they’re rather small [00:05:00] small segments
Mike: It’s interesting how you categorize the different types of tourists.
And I wanted to ask you, when you said that you’re, what do you mean by being operational? So you said you weren’t, you’re not particularly operational in Africa. When you say operational, do you mean that you, there are actual local campaigns in each of these regions?
Markus: Yeah, exactly. Maybe I have to explain how we work as Switzerland Tourism.
So we are the NTO of Switzerland, which means the National Tourism Organizations. That’s a corporation under public law in this case. We are not a governmental office. We are a company, but owned by the state. And we are purely a marketing organization. So our job is to promote and domestic and international tourism demand for Switzerland.
We don’t make tourism policy, we don’t shape tourism product wise we don’t develop tourism [00:06:00] products, we just market tourism in Switzerland. Of course, we shape the face of Switzerland with our brand campaigns. But yeah, we have this 280 people in total that work I think about half of them work in our headquarters in Zurich.
And the other half works in the markets. We have 36 offices in 23 markets which are basically not entirely group, but basically just countries like the U S is a market, Australia is a market. And there we have offices and we don’t currently have an office in in an African country. That’s what I mean by not being operational.
Of course you can see the YouTube ads in South Africa. But we are not like targeting the campaigns in markets we are not present.
Mike: Do you have specific ad campaigns for each of these markets?
Markus: We have these global [00:07:00] campaigns like the Rotterfeder campaign is our biggest campaign, like at least this year.
And that’s global. But what kind of global we just there are target marketings. This was an autumn campaign this time And then it was just like we’re playing it. Like we are buying. Coverage in mostly europe with this campaign but the markets then Also work with the campaign and they do maybe two events.
They do publicly that relations work with local media based on Roger feather and this campaign and Such things we don’t exactly have like big advertising campaigns like spots individually for the markets what the markets do is more like the Very hands on work in the markets because they know the country they’re in and they talk to tour [00:08:00] operators, they talk to local media, they invite content creators to Switzerland.
That’s what the markets do basically.
Mike: I see. And what are some of the trends? In tourism to Switzerland in the past year, in the past few years, have you seen changes in terms of what people are looking for or the direction that Switzerland’s going in terms of how they market themselves or what, or even the sort of guests they’re looking to attract?
Is it changing over the past, say, decade?
Markus: There are always changes. It’s a bit. Difficult to say at the moment because there was COVID And COVID, hit the tourism industry very hard as you can imagine with the lockdowns Like from one day to the other Like it was just ended Kind of tourism just ended for some time and There have been lots of effects [00:09:00] not just for the worse.
Also Partly for there have been positive effects, but we I’m just now finding out which effects are lasting and what kind of bounces back. So it’s a bit hard to say what’s really a trend and what was an influence of COVID. One trend obviously influenced COVID. There are trends that are influenced by COVID people from Switzerland kind of rediscovered their own country.
People from Switzerland presidents helped us compensate the long haul markets that just fell away during COVID. And it’s bouncing back, but there’s still a lot of Swiss people still traveling Switzerland more than before COVID. And activity wise, camping is a trend with like social media trends, obviously van life, glamping and the likes on official campsites, but also especially camping in the wild seems to be a thing at the [00:10:00] moment.
Outdoor sports are trending E bike from, more from a supplier side with lots of destinations now offering a vast array of e bike trails and hiking has always been a big thing in Switzerland with, I think about 60 percent of people that say they do hike regularly, but it’s trending even more for years now and COVID also helped push it even higher.
I think it’s a rather young demographic that discovered hiking now and keeps hiking. So like Gen Z is interestingly hiking. In Switzerland.
Mike: I wonder also if, especially for a younger generation, if hiking and wild camping is something which has come out of just what is also feasible, money wise, being such an expensive country.
If tourists from outside of Switzerland want to visit, probably one of the things you hear [00:11:00] often is boy oh boy, this place is expensive, so these are, things which you can do for a very low cost.
Markus: Yeah, there are ways to save money in Switzerland, of course. But there’s also trends like, that are expensive, like this van life trend.
Of course you don’t have to buy hotels, but like having a camper van in itself is quite an expensive thing. So obviously we don’t attract all demographics alike. So when you come to Switzerland, visit Switzerland, you. Like people with money are somewhat over represented, let’s put it like, like this.
Mike: How has the growing number of tourists from emerging markets like China, India influenced tourism strategies in Switzerland? Has it influenced it?
Markus: Actually, that’s it started with a little misconception because china india they have been [00:12:00] growth markets until 2019 but actually they still are growth markets, but they They took quite the hit during covet and both of them and especially china haven’t bounced back or haven’t fully recovered yet So we’re seeing less people from china actually at the moment and in 2019 Actually, it’s the U.
S. market that’s growing the most with it being our most important long haul market at the moment, and it’s even about to overtake Germany as the most important foreign market overall. So the U. S. guests are coming in large numbers at the moment, and it I think it changes the work in the specific in the specific market, but it doesn’t change exactly.
global strategies because there have always, there are always changes in markets. Germany and Japan, for [00:13:00] example are markets with rather declining numbers of visitors. So at the same time, US, the US is growing and they compensate each other. But of course the people in the market have to adapt.
They have to tap with new generations and have To adapt to changing numbers within their market.
Mike: I find it interesting that the U. S. is growing. All you hear about with English speaking news at least, all you hear about is how difficult the economy is in the U. S., but that doesn’t seem to translate to people going on holiday.
Do you have the current statistics offhand on the number of tourists coming to Switzerland and what the trend is in general, over the last few years?
Markus: Just on a very global level It’s the numbers are growing. We have this currency or not the currency, but our currency of measurement kind of is hotel overnights.
[00:14:00] That’s what we measure on a kind of monthly basis are life data. And so last year. We had 42 million overnights, which was a new record. It, I think it was up five to 6% year over year. And it surpassed first time. It surpassed the pre covid years, which was like 2019 was a reference year for quite some time because it was the record year and now we surpassed that.
The numbers are good at the moment.
Mike: Does hotel overnight include, what does that include exactly? Is that specifically hotels? So that’s also hostels. That’s also Airbnbs. No, it’s really just hotels.
Markus: So we are we, there’s a lot we know from market surveys, but there’s also a lot we don’t know, actually, especially on the short term level, because we really just measure, we actually don’t measure anything.[00:15:00]
Or at least we don’t measure the hotel overnights. That’s the federal Statistics that measures them, these hotel overnights. And that’s really just hotels. That’s not Airbnbs, that’s not holiday homes. We don’t really have measure of day trips because when someone from Southern Germany visits Switzerland, visits a place, two places, three places, and just leaves again.
They don’t appear in our statistics when they don’t sleep in a hotel. So that’s why we have to do these surveys, market surveys to get additional data.
Mike: Which regions, I could take a guess, but I’m curious what the numbers are. Which regions or cities of Switzerland receive the most visitors?
Markus: I just wanted to hand the question back when you first came to Switzerland, what places Did you want to listen?
Mike: Good question. So I think the places, I, [00:16:00] consider myself someone who likes to travel quite a lot. And so usually if I Google the top five places to visit, they’re usually the places I don’t necessarily want to go.
And I find it with Switzerland now a bit of a shame in a way, because whenever you Google it, the top 10 Google searches always have the same five to 10 places. So if I would guess. I’m lucky I have a Swiss wife so she’s able to give me some inside information in terms of, so it’s, I’m not a good example of a typical tourist I guess, but I would guess number one would be Zomat, number two would be Interlaken, maybe you can group Interlaken Grundervald, that region together, and then number three Lucerne.
I think those three typically come up the most and then perhaps after that you’ve got some of the cities like Zurich, Bern, Geneva. If I had to list it I would say those. Six in that order would be where I put my chips.
Markus: Yeah, that’s not [00:17:00] too bad. I can’t even give you an exact list because it’s Here again, it’s pretty difficult because how do you group them?
How do you rank them? A big city compared to a small destination, maybe just one mountain railway, then compared to Zermatt where there’s like a whole area of railways. I can’t really tell you like this place gets the most visits, but obviously the places you mentioned are on top. There’s actually like fun facts.
We have a ranking with the most visited places, but it’s just like a lot of it’s excluded. So the place where you have to pay an entrance fee, the place where we can measure who is coming with the most visitors is actually the zoo in Zurich. All the mountain railways and cable cars are excluded because again, it’s hard to measure by like in the winter.
If you have people with [00:18:00] ski tickets that just take the same same lift 20 times. How do you compare that to one person visiting Lucerne? But it’s it’s obviously the Alpine regions and the big cities attract the most people. They’re the big Alpine cantons of Bern Grabunden, Grisons, Wallis and they have a lot of popular tourist destinations and in terms of cities, I think it’s Zurich because it’s just a big city.
It’s also a nice city. I like it. And Lucerne, of course, that are very well visited. And yeah you asked what makes them attractive and it’s just, as Switzerland better, there are lots of other places that are nice, but these are the landmark places that are internationally known and especially the long haul guests.
They just visit. The first time they visit four of these places. They have like people from Asia sometimes dreamed of [00:19:00] being on the Jungfraujoch or seeing the mother horn for like their entire life. And you cannot then tell them, no, please go to this other place. So when long haul guests come for the first time, they usually do visit those famous places.
And our job is to Call them the rest in addition.
Mike: Yeah. I suppose also it’s significantly, these places, when you go to Interlaken, you get there and everything’s in English, everything’s in Mandarin. It’s really geared towards, it’s really far away international tourists. I think if someone from the U S or China has traveled here and they go somewhere in Graubünden, it might be a little bit more difficult for them to get around.
Does. Switzerland, do anything to market the country and get these people in besides just ad campaigns. What was coming to mind in particular, which I guess it was a ad [00:20:00] campaign, was when I was looking into, for another potential episode, I was looking into the Bollywood scene in Switzerland and how much the film industry is quite big specifically in Bollywood because some of these big Bollywood movies like to film in the mountains.
And then I also noticed there’s always, there’s an ad campaign specifically with, I guess it’s a big Bollywood actor targeted towards India. And I thought that’s interesting. It’s almost very tailored towards a market because of Bollywood. And I wonder if Swiss Switzerland tourism does any other sort of targeted marketing besides just the global campaign.
Markus: Yes, that’s the the work our markets do. They have have to identify what works in their in their countries, and have to choose brand ambassadors. For example, in India, our I think most important brand ambassador is like a, what do you call this, a javelin thrower Sports person that has some connection to Switzerland and likes Switzerland and [00:21:00] is a very outdoorsy kind of guy called Neeraj Chopra and That works really well in India because he’s like a star there.
He’s a very famous person that people look up to so we work with him as a brand ambassador And there’s like apart from campaigns, there’s just a lot of like hands on work because there are two things we call of course we have like local social media Activities as well. We invite content creators.
We use like Regional specific platforms like Weibo in China. And, but two of the most important things we do is we call them key media management and key account management. And it’s basically just key media management is just like talk to media and journalists and also invite them to Switzerland, travel journalists that then write media articles about Switzerland, if a [00:22:00] lot, basically glitches.
Thousands of those trips and every year and the other thing is a key account management. That’s them talking to inviting sharing knowledge to tour operators. And also the. deals that are involved providing them with hotel capacities and things. So that’s very hands on and everyday work we do.
Mike: Does, do you have any challenges? Is this a Swiss specific when it comes to promoting Switzerland to a
Markus: There are always challenges. Good question. There’s always challenges in terms of change, changing media landscape, digitalizations. We constantly, but I guess that’s true for everyone, have to adapt to [00:23:00] changes. There’s always challenges. Also like an intense competition, like the, and then a market saturation.
There are just a lot of places you can visit instead of Switzerland. Yeah, it’s hard daily work to convince people, not just convince people, we just want to grow in, in, in quantity, which is. Our goal is to have the right people at the right place at the right time. Sounds a bit like marketing speech, but it has a lot to do with guiding the the guest flows also to lesser known places and to, to lesser known seasons like autumn and spring.
So yeah, that’s a lot of And there’s things like economic fluctuations countries that just break away for political reasons like Russia, for example, or you have things like currency is the Swiss franc that’s very strong, which makes it year over year, even more expensive for people to come to [00:24:00] Switzerland.
And those are all like factors that that challenges.
Mike: Coming from Australia, the difference between the Swiss franc the past or since COVID is really insane. And so I almost feel bad for I don’t feel bad for them, but I’m very conscious when my friends and family come and visit how expensive it has become.
It always was expensive, but, and so I wondered, I wonder if you can answer this for me. If someone from Australia says, I want to come see the Alps. And don’t worry about the iconic Jungfraujoch or the Matterhorn. I just want to go to the Alps. Why would they come to Switzerland and not go to Italy or Austria where it’s, you could still get the Alps and it’s much more affordable.
Is that a topic which you think about?
Markus: Yeah. The Alps are the Alps. There are mountains in these other countries and And that’s not just true for the Alps. [00:25:00] There’s beautiful landscapes in I don’t think I’m allowed to say this, but there are really beautiful landscapes in lots of countries.
And then we have to create this brand that really makes people come to Switzerland and we do have a certain advantages there because, for example, Switzerland is small. It is an advantage because everything’s close together. We’re seeing this trend of people, especially American tourists.
Just staying in hotels in the big cities, staying in hotels in Zurich, and just making day trips to the Alps. Just visiting this mountain today, another mountain tomorrow, and just staying in the cities. And that’s what you can do in Switzerland. You can travel to French, the French speaking part, to like the Mediterranean The Gino part you cannot do this all in one day.
You can have the [00:26:00] cities, you can have lakes, you can even maybe visit, we don’t encourage that, but you can visit neighboring countries, it’s just like a day trip. So we have this advantage of things being close together We have the advantage of having a very good public transportation system Where you can just and a lot of guests do use this public transportation system.
We have an interesting tickets for guests where you can just like basically use All the transportation system for you choose 3 days and as you I’m sure, public transportation. So it’s an interest brings you every takes you everywhere. And that’s an advantage.
Of course. So yeah, we have to play these advantages to in our market.
Mike: I think the public transport is just absolute killer how you can live in Zurich and we don’t own a car and don’t even intend to own one because you just don’t need one. And especially [00:27:00] getting to the base of ski slopes very easily with public transport.
It still shocks me how good it is. How do you decide? Which regions to focus on for tourism development? So there’s the top five or ten that everybody knows which come up when you google best places in Switzerland But if you want to promote new places, how do you choose them?
Markus: It’s actually quite the other way around we have this and we have federal like you can have two parts that Stack on each other.
We have this federal mandate that is to promote all regions all Touristic regions that basically every region in Switzerland is a touristic region so with the like tax money that we get we have to promote all these regions That’s the baseline. And then on top the regions themselves, regions, destinations, and service providers like hotels and railways and such, [00:28:00] they can just it’s a partner system.
They can basically be our partners and get certain services, marketing services from us. And on top, they can book packages we, We can produce like promotional movies for them. We can play their ads in the markets They can like a region can comes to us and says We want more guests from the u.
s and so we The region gets directly connected to the U. S. Our U. S. market office and then they work for this region over there. So it’s more, it’s less we as Switzerland Tourism decide which regions to promote. It’s more like the regions that reach out to us and say, I need promotion, help us.
That’s the way it works.
Mike: And it’s very cantonal or it’s federal, which one tends to make the most decisions or [00:29:00] pushes, decides to promote the most?
Markus: It’s very layered. It’s, we, there, there’s Switzerland tourism, and then there are 13 tourism regions. It’s obviously less than we have cantons 26 cantons.
Sometimes these are like exactly the same. Canton borders. And sometimes there are several cantons mixed lumped together. Those are the 13 tourism regions. And then below that you have like destinations that are also grouped in different way ways. You have sometimes small destinations.
You have bigger destinations, bigger regions that act as the destinations. And at the very end you have, not at the end, but on the lowest level, on the most hands on local level, you have the service providers like hotels and And they all make marketing decisions and all work with each other.
So like a [00:30:00] hotel can work directly with us A region can work directly with us or a destination can work directly with us a hotel can work with a region And so on so it’s really a very free An ecosystem with a lot of players and a lot of people work in tourism marketing, actually.
Mike: How do the numbers vary between summer and winter at the moment?
Is it significantly more tourists in one over the other? Or between just those two, is it quite well balanced?
Markus: It depends a bit on, on where you’re looking at obviously different in the cities or the alpine regions, but like traditionally winter is just a big thing with a lot of infrastructure built for winter.
Wherever you can do winter sport activities, where you can ski or do all the other things you can do in the winter. These places are usually. Full [00:31:00] during, hotels are booked during the winter not like every week, but the holiday seasons and the effort has been in the last years or decades to, of course, it was to promote summer.
Because this infrastructure exists, there are the hotels, there are the parking spaces, there are the mountain railways, and it just makes economic sense to, to use these infrastructures during the summertime and earn money during the summer for so yeah, then In the alpine regions the winter numbers are definitely still higher, but then they have caught a lot Have caught up a lot.
During summer and now what we’re trying is to promote the other off seasons Spring which where the numbers are still quite low. There are Lots of hotels that just close down during spring and autumn So you have these [00:32:00] Huge giant hotel that’s filled during the winter time Maybe almost filled during the summer time But it just closes for two or three months during the off seasons and that’s what we want to change
Mike: do you market Switzerland differently to different regions.
So if you know that I’m going to take some, hopefully not stereotypes, but if you take say, for example, China and India, for example, are very interested in cities and the sort of premium side of Switzerland, but then you have the U S who are very interested in hiking and outdoor activities. If you see these, do you market Switzerland differently?
differently to different regions or do you try to keep it really consistent?
Markus: Both actually. We have this like core brand positioning where we say like the campaign, the global [00:33:00] brand campaign is called I need Switzerland. And that’s the same everywhere with kind of usually a bit the same slogans and visuals.
Do we try to promote Switzerland as a must visit destination for its natural beauty, for cultural richness and the like, high quality experiences. And then there are a lot of market specific topics and that’s again the work of the people in the market offices. So in Europe, we emphasize sustainable travel regional food, city breaks, accessibility by train.
In North America, it’s landscapes. That work, beautiful landscapes, scenic landscapes, outdoor adventure, U. S. guests are very outdoorsy, hiking, skiing. Then those iconic train journeys the Glacier Express. You mentioned India. There’s yeah, there’s this Bollywood approach. We do in India with [00:34:00] a scenic beauty and cultural experiences, romantic landscapes and the likes.
And then the Gulf countries, that’s also, yeah, it’s quite the obvious one. Also not wanting to be stereotypical, but then there we promote luxury and cool climate. We advertise the cool Swiss summer in the Gulf countries because people come. Counter Switzerland to cool down.
Mike: Do you, is there a strategic in terms of which regions that you want to develop further?
Maybe you see in Africa, in South Africa, that, the economy is growing, people are traveling more. Do you constantly keep an eye on emerging markets to think, these could be an area that we really want to start putting effort into to to attract people?
Markus: Yeah, we kind of experiment with new markets from time [00:35:00] to time.
There’s there are tiers within the markets like look at the exact numbers, but they’re like priority markets and that are very important to us that provide a certain number of overnights with their guests. Where we oftentimes have like more than one office and we just kept it.
More standard markets, whereas just like maybe one office in the capital. And then we have what we did in the past few years is open up so called antennas where there’s, for the sake of experimenting or trying a market out, just maybe just one person in this market for a limited time, maybe three or four years.
And we start doing activities there and measure how it works. And sometimes we close them because it’s a hard market. That’s hard. [00:36:00] To develop, or we noticed like this, it’s not really a match with Switzerland because we have, of course we have, can’t just work all possible markets. We have to be efficient somewhat.
And sometimes it works very well. We we tried Portugal for a few years and it worked very well. So we now included Portugal to our main markets. I think together with Spain we work this market now. We also have like periodically tried, not with people being They’re exactly not with the opening an office, but we also have tried like single marketing measures in Africa.
So we always try to test the markets. Yes.
Mike: How do you tackle language? You would, you’ve got the four languages or three languages, internationally for Switzerland. Do you have marketing campaigns in each of them to connect to their relevant countries that speak that language?
[00:37:00] Or is it very English based when you are promoting Switzerland internationally?
Markus: It’s a bit both. Of course, English is the main language. We just changed our whole brand design. We worked with, even our brand was Switzerland Tourism in translated to the respective language of the market. And now it’s just Switzerland.
We use the brand Switzerland in all the market, not Swiss Tourisme or Schweiz Tourismus anymore. Certainly, English also becomes more and more important, but the local work is still often done in the local language working with media, working with tour operators, working with local content creators is done in the local languages.
And Therefore, in the markets, we have a mix in our office mix of usually with Swiss people that work there as expats and local people, [00:38:00] Australian people working for us in Switzerland tourism in Sydney together with people from Switzerland.
Mike: So how did you land on the new brand? More or less just basically just says Switzerland, right?
That’s all it is. If you just read it.
Markus: Yeah that’s Because the old brand we had this iconic or some people called it iconic and golden flower Which is basically a natal vice a flower a golden one and we had it for I think about 30 years It was very well known and you know Of course, when we changed the brand, there was criticism.
How can you like get rid of the flower, but. The flower just didn’t really work anymore. The flower with the addition Switzerland Tourism, it it was like we had, I think, 17 language versions of our brand, because Switzerland Tourism was always in the [00:39:00] target market’s language. And The flower didn’t really work anymore.
In digital and it was a very complicated, Brand and didn’t really scale for different uses So we just had to modernize and modernize it and people sometimes don’t like when brands get modernized But after like just one year they realize oh, it’s better The old one really was dated and that’s what happened now so it’s You It’s more like.
Before it was just a logo, it was a brand and now it’s more there’s a lot that goes into it. It’s more like a brand ecosystem, a brand system with lots of details and lots of use cases, how we can use the brand. And it’s much more tailored to the future of advertising,
Mike: Where, yeah, when it comes to modernizing, modernizing and Swiss typically, Switzerland typically don’t go together in the same sentence.
[00:40:00] So I can imagine that you’ll have a bit of a reflex when changing, but I think it really suits the ads as well. The much more modern ads with Roger Federer, I think the combination of the two fit well. Do you,
Markus: yeah, sorry,
Mike: go on.
Markus: No, that’s just that’s what happens. Usually, you just see a new brand and you will think you, Oh, I like the old one better.
And then you just, over time you realize that there’s a reason that it had to be changed. And I also think the first time I saw the new logo, I thought, yeah, maybe it’s, is it really, does it really have that much identity? But now it’s. It’s just, it grew a lot on me and then it really integrates well into yeah, for example commercials and also it works well in print, it works well on digital.
So it’s a really nice brand to use from a user perspective.
Mike: With the exception of the Hotel Overnights, do you collect any other interesting data which helps you [00:41:00] inform decisions or inform how Swiss, Swiss Switzerland tourism is going?
Markus: Yeah we are conducting this large market market survey that’s called the Tourism Monitor, Swiss Tourism Monitor.
I think we the intention is to do this every four years. And it’s really vast, isn’t it? A lot, lots of questions are asked there. And of course you could say always, Ask more, but then people probably would just not do it anymore. So we have to prioritize what we really want to know. And we usually do this it’s like with thousands of people.
From all markets, of course, because we there we get very market specific information what’s the demographic of guests from India and what are they interested in and things like that. And also a certain, we do not, like the hotel overnights obviously don’t help us at all to, to track [00:42:00] movement.
If one person stays at the hotel for two nights and at another hotel for three nights, it’s just like the same thing as two different people staying in these hotels. We don’t have like profiles on how people are moving. We also don’t really have this with the studies because that’s not what we’re focusing on but we get much more insight Into the interest of people and at least we can find out Are people visiting several places or just one place?
And for how long are they in switzerland all numbers that vary them a lot from market to market So yeah, we do that this every four years. It’s a really big study and we had to postpone it during COVID and the new numbers will be out Just in about one or two weeks. So we’re recording this a bit too early [00:43:00] I don’t have fresh numbers yet.
The lots of the data we have at the moment is from 2017 so quite a bit old because of COVID But we are expecting A lot of new insights in the next few weeks.
Mike: Do you expect the numbers to, I guess you’ve got this huge COVID block in the middle, which I guess really skews your numbers, but are you expecting numbers to be very different from four years ago or no, from seven, 2017.
So from seven years ago.
Markus: Yeah, exactly. That’s why we postponed it because if we did the study during COVID It would just make no sense to compare the data afterwards and now as things have normalized it makes sense to do this study again so we can compare to the 2017 numbers. That’s just there’s a lot of change In details, it’s not like we do have the overnight numbers.
We do see if more people come to Switzerland. We do also know from which markets people come. [00:44:00] But all the details like Changing interests and changing demographics. That’s What’s interesting and what? also again depends on the markets because that’s pretty stable with some markets and Sometimes there are huge changes with other markets like china and india again where in both markets, years ago, we just have like More, we had more like older people that traveled in big groups were not very experienced in traveling.
So they needed a lot of assistance from tour operators and especially in India, this has changed a lot. So now we have very adventurous people, young people visiting Switzerland that travel individually or in rather small groups. And such market shifts happen from time to time and the And marketing surveys helps help us get further insights into such shifts.[00:45:00]
Mike: Do you, with the data that you collect, do you get an idea of what’s important to, to, to tourists? You said earlier that, there’s a rise in popularity with sustainability and that’s where things like the the wild camping and the focus on public transport comes from. Do you collect this information in terms of what is interesting to tourists now?
Markus: Yes, very much that’s a thing of the mind. Main driver for these studies is to find out what people are interested in. So what are the drivers for traveling Europe, for traveling Switzerland, where we have to improve. So for example like one of the main travel drivers for Europe is food.
People travel as it’s not the top is maybe number three travel for like Culinary experiences, and that’s, for example, one point where Switzerland is not on top of the [00:46:00] list. We are not extremely well known for good food. You’ve got some big
Mike: competition.
Markus: Yeah, exactly. France, Italy it’s hard to compete there.
But we see this data and then we try to adapt. We now did this, campaign where we are promoting wine tourism because you have these wine regions like the Napa Valley in U. S. and you have these wine regions in Italy and France that are not just origins of good wine, maybe food, but also popular travel destinations.
People go there, people go to Tuscany for a week of vacation. And yeah, you being in Switzerland, I think you’ve been to Lausanne and seen the Lavaux region at Lake Geneva, and it’s just a beautiful place, when you have nice weather and the rays of the sun caressing the vineyards.
And what we’re [00:47:00] doing now is promote these regions, which hasn’t really been done before in Switzerland, as travel destinations. Yeah, and that’s also, that’s something that there, there’s insight from these market studies going into these decisions, of course.
Mike: I have one last. One last question for you.
So for residents of Switzerland, myself included, I haven’t been to a lot of the big ticket places on the top three list. I haven’t been to Zermatt, A, because it’s quite far away from Zurich, but also B, it’s very expensive and very crowded. And that also goes for Zurich, for example. Jungfraujoch, I haven’t done that because I see the price and I’m just like, oh boy.
Markus: Fair enough.
Mike: And very busy. So what, based on the numbers that you have or what you’ve seen, or even just as a a Swiss citizen for a long time or for your whole life, what, when are the best times to visit these very popular places when there’ll be less people, but still the weather promotes a really [00:48:00] nice holiday?
Markus: It depends a bit. It also depends on which guests are visiting these places, because not all markets travel at the same time. So sometimes in some places that are especially like, you can’t make a specific example, but you have people at times you wouldn’t expect from Swiss holidays. I think. It’s important to remember that, also in this case, also in Zermatt, also on Jungfrau Jochess, it’s still always A lot of Swiss people also going there.
It’s maybe not 50 percent on the Jungfraujoch, but you always find a lot of Swiss people in Zermatt. And so you can can look at when are Swiss people traveling. So if you don’t like crowds, maybe just don’t. Go on a nice summer holiday weekend but there are lots of times like we do have these popular hotspots.
Of course, I [00:49:00] wouldn’t want to deny that but there’s not one destination in Switzerland, not a single destination. That’s just crowded every day, all day. In fact, I’ve been to Zermatt and Interlaken many times and oftentimes I don’t really see many people. Also, with nice weather, and it also depends a bit on the time of the day, because when there are crowds, they usually made up of day trip guests, often from Switzerland, but also people I talked about like Americans that have their hotel in Zurich, and just make a day trip to Ermo, they don’t derive very early.
They don’t stay for very long. They, there are just, there are those people that don’t want to dive deep. They just want to have their pictures and their selfies and they leave. So they have to return to their hotel. Good recommendation I [00:50:00] would give is to be at those places in the mornings and in the evenings.
Oftentimes these are very beautiful. times of the day. I just drove to Gstaad this weekend early in the morning, and there was just mist everywhere, and the sun rays coming through the mountains, and it was just beautiful. Avoid maybe early afternoons. And because so many people are just day tripping, if you have the time and the means, just go to those places and stay in a hotel so you can get up early and also enjoy surmat, for example, during the evening, maybe eat something.
You won’t have crowds in the evenings and in the mornings. And yeah that’s an advice I would give probably.
Mike: Marcus, thank you very much for your time. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Markus: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.
Mike: Bye bye.
Markus: [00:51:00] Bye.
