TBEX Europe Costa Brava 2015: Effective strategy for branding mature tourist destinations?

Abstract

Travel bloggers are digital prescribers who help to construct the brand image of a tourist destination and whose posts are often deemed more credible than communications emitted by companies and brands. This article presents the case of the World Congress of Travel Bloggers 'TBEX Europe Costa Brava 2015, which was co-organized by the Costa Brava Tourist Board as a promotional action to improve its 2.0 communication and harness the power of bloggers' prescriptions as destination ambassadors. In addition, a monitoring study was conducted during and after the event, which revealed that online conversations resulting from the event generated more than 186 million impressions in an audience of 11 million people: figures that far exceed those of earlier promotional actions carried out by the Board. The study also identified interactions between members of online communities, finding that 20 influential users generated more than half of the total number of potential impressions