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TheBuzz Erika Engle |
They’re not
traitors, reallyBeing dependent on tourism means beaucoup time, attention and money is spent promoting Hawaii as a visitor destination.
So, does that mean local companies that promote other visitor destinations are turncoats?
Not according to them.
Revenue from marketing contracts keeps the agencies and their employees working and sends work and income to other Hawaii tax-paying businesses with employees.
Murata Creative Inc. will share some of its new $500,000 contract to market Moorea with local publishers and printers, according to President Mike Murata.
They'll be producing a vacation planner that the Moorea Visitors Bureau will send out to consumers, versus the Tahiti Visitors Bureau's vacation planners, which are distributed only to travel agents.
Murata will develop a multimedia advertising campaign aimed at the western United States, Japanese and European markets.
"I think the primary target will be people that have already been to Hawaii and want to find some place that will be even more exotic," he said.
If Hawaii is not a major market for travel to Moorea, it should be, he said.
"In Tahiti, when you tell them you're from Hawaii, they start drooling. In Hawaii, it's the same thing in reverse," Murata said.
"It is truly gorgeous and very rural at the same time, like Kauai was probably 50 years ago."
Glimpses are online at www.gomoorea.com.
Speaking of the Internet, the company Web site www.muratacreative.com helped get them the job, Murata said. That, and the fact that Moorea Visitors Bureau President Marc Collins was on vacation in Hawaii.
Yap and Palau are the non-Hawaii destinations promoted by The Limtiaco Co., but President Ruth Limtiaco doesn't see it as disloyal to Hawaii.
"I lived there for 14 years before I came to Hawaii and I have developed loyalties to and affinities for people in those islands that go back to the 1970s," she said.
"These destinations are so completely different from Hawaii that they are not in the same category." The primary traveler to Micronesia from North America is the scuba diver, she said.
The diving possibilities were no doubt part of a Palau promotional video, which Limtiaco hired a Hawaii production company to make, "so it does actually help the local economy," she said.
Among Limtiaco's varied clients is the Maui Visitors Bureau, for which it developed the "Maui Loved Kids" campaign and marketing materials, so it does its part to promote our islands.
Sheila Donnelly is a globetrotting purveyor of public relations and marketing with offices in Honolulu, Los Angeles, Tucson and New York.
Her clients include hotels, resorts, government tourism departments and golf courses and golf course architects from Hawaii to far-flung places like Chile, Egypt, Switzerland and a whole world more.
Donnelly doesn't see her work for properties in other destinations as taking away from her island home.
"People are going to go to other places, it is not necessarily competitive. Someone who wants to vacation in Patagonia or who wants to go to Sedona or to see the pyramids in Egypt may also come to Hawaii, but it would be a different thing," she said.
"Ultimately all of these clients in different areas help us with our tourism clients in Hawaii because they actually get a global point of view," said Donnelly.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin.
Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle,
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached
at: eengle@starbulletin.com