In adherence to the ongoing “Rediscover Maldives...the sunny side of life” campaign, Visit Maldives has started a digital campaign with Zomato for the Middle Eastern region.

The purpose of this two-week campaign is to capitalize on the platform’s large audience of 500,000 users, to build awareness and recall for Maldives through digital and social media promotions. To do so, Zomato would conduct an activation through an ‘Order & Win’ campaign where users with the highest basket value or frequency of orders will be qualified for a lucky draw to win a trip to Maldives.

Launched in Delhi 12 years ago, Zomato is an Indian restaurant aggregator and food delivery start-up that is extremely popular in UAE, and has grown to become one of the largest food aggregators in the world. The platform is present in 24 countries and more than 10,000 cities globally, further enabling their vision of better food for people. In this regard, this campaign would generate more than 3.4 million impressions through the competition and it’s supporting promotional emails, push notifications and the brand tiles, ensuring large-scale visibility to the Maldives.

Following the ease-down measures and reopening of major markets around the globe, the Maldives has become an ideal location for traveling due to its geographically blessed and naturally isolated islands, making it one of the safest destinations to travel to. In addition to this, the constant efforts taken by the travel and tourism industry of Maldives to provide tourists the assurance of safety, and the joint marketing efforts by Visit Maldives and other stakeholders, have placed Maldives as the World’s Leading Destination at the World Travel Awards 2020. The achievement of this award at such a crucial time would assist strongly in increasing the visitor numbers from the Middle East to the Maldives.

Similarly, as the Middle Eastern markets continue to reopen, marketing efforts in the region have increased in order to regain the market share, and increase tourist arrivals from the GCC and the KSA region. This is carried forward by utilizing campaigns such as the joint campaign with DNATA Travel, Radio promotion with Al Khaleejiya, and the Middle Eastern influencer FAM trip — all targeting potential segments. These actions have firmly placed the UAE market in 4th place since the reopening of Maldives’ borders on 15th July.

Considering the global perspective, Visit Maldives continues to carry out several activities in key markets to promote Maldives, in which over 412 different types of marketing activities have been carried out in 22 countries. From these, 314 activities were carried out during this pandemic as part of the crisis recovery plan; some of these include fairs, webinars, FAM trips, online roadshows, outdoor campaigns, digital media campaigns and more. These include notable campaigns such as the online roadshow in China, global advertising campaign with Skyscanner and global advertising campaign with CNN. Additionally, the initiation of the Maldives Border Miles loyalty program and the Allied Inbound Travel Insurance policy assists the efforts to entice travelers to return to the sunny side of life.