Maldives tourism rebranded

It used to be the sunny side of life and now its always natural. Not that it used to be unnatural bytheway :).

old sunny-side-of-life logo

The brand change has been on official minds for quite some time and the first slogan that came to mind was “value for money”. As soon as our tourism minister, Dr. Zulfa came with this idea, it was torpedoed by various big-shots of tourism industry across the board, as the slogan seems to down-sell our tourism product. Since then, the search for a better slogan and logo had gone on and ultimately the winning slogan and logo was conjured up by a ‘QUO KEEN’ of Bangkok and London’.

the new always natural logo

Re-branding is the creation of a new name, term, symbol, design, or a combination of them for an established brand with the intention of developing a differentiated (new) position in the mind of stakeholders and competitors. Re-branding could be done for various reasons such as the need to shed a negative image,or to differentiate from competitors. In our case, its more like that somebody somewhere up in the ministry just got bored at staring up at the old sunny side of Maldives logo and vowed to change it at whatever costs! Anyways, the final product is good and thanks to wherever it is due. However we would like to note that our key tourism indicators still look good and keeps getting better.

Below is a comparison of key tourism indicators as a percentage over 2010. The only indicator that has gone south is the average stay duration which could account for the Chinese tourists who opt for shorter stays.

key tourism indicators of 2011

Ps: A heated thread in Minivan on this issue provides a lot of background on the issue.

Laamu Asseyri given to JResorts

proposed design of the Asseyri Project

Laamu Asseyri project could be the next best thing to come to Maldives tourism. Asseyri (or Beach) project was thought up to cater for the growing calls to start mid-market tourism in the country. Tourism experts have called for such a concept for a long time. With the new Assyri concept, guest rooms will be built on the western beach side of Laamu Gan on approximately 25 acres of land. There will be two resorts with 300 beds each, 79 guest houses and recreational facilities.

location of Asseyri highlighed in red

The selling point for new Asseyri based tourism will be to be able to give lower room rates than conventional resort islands which is perfectly feasible as existing resort islands operate at very high profit margins.

However the concept does not seem to have generated a lot of interests and only 3 parties are known to have proposed bids to build the facilities. The winning bidder is JResorts which is already struggling with a string of undeveloped islands and barely managing to keep afloat their only running resort at Alidhoo. However there is still potential for this idea as Laamu area is being expanded for tourism.

Laamu Gan Asseyri project