If you are thinking ‘holiday accommodation where?’ you are probably not alone. We’ve just launched a small site for one of our clients in Portugal to support the accommodation side of their business. Built on WordPress it utilises the same custom template and resources their larger site is built on. Not only was this a very cost effective way of doing it but it also means the site retains the look and feel of the main Alentejo Adventures site. We worked with the online reservations site www.booking.com to set up online availability and reservations and integrated this functionality on the new site. Portuguese version coming soon.
Fair enough. But where is the Alentejo again? The opening paragraph in the Lonely Planet guide goes something like this and in my opinion like most of the stuff you read in their guides is pretty bang on.
Alentejo is like Portuguese fado music – ultra traditional, intriguingly diverse and lingeringly sentimental. Covering one-third of the country, Portugal’s largest region is bewitching, with its dry, golden plains, rolling hillsides and lime-green vines, rugged coastline, tiny whitewashed villages and majestic medieval cities. Its people are fiercely proud, yet somewhat melancholic.
So what’s the problem? Bottom line is, certainly in the UK, a whole lot more people are searching for holidays in the Algarve rather than holidays in the Alentejo. The difference in the volume of searches is startling – for some keyphrases the Algarve equivalent drives over a thousand times more volume than the Alentejo equivalent. There lies the next challenge and one that you can help crack if you can get the national tourism organisation working with the regional tourism organisation and both working with the businesses on the ground. You can probably guess where we are going with this so watch this space!
Tags: case study, tourism marketing, website
