Greenland welcomes tourist-pioneers

You can also have free access to hundreds of photos of Greenland on Visit Greenland website.

Visit Greenland’s website at www.greenland.com provides complete information on Greenland and how to visit the island.

Greenland is aggressively reaching out to get more tourists with social media campaigns and a new marketing theme that presents Greenland as a “pioneer” destination.

The island next door to Nunavut already gets 30,000 cruise ship passengers and 35,000 tourists a year — about ten times than Nunavut sees.

And these visitors bring in up to $100 million a year — more than three times a figure cited by Nunavut Tourism in its 2008 exit survey.

But Greenland now plans to reach even more potential visitors with its “be a pioneer” slogan and online sites where, if you’re an adventure-lover, you can decide if “you prefer hiking with a guide, kayaking among icebergs or mountain climbing.”

Those are among the new tools used by Visit Greenland, presented by Anne Mette Christiansen, its director of branding, March 21 at the Nunavut Tourism conference in Iqaluit.

Greenland used to sell itself as the place “you will never forget,” said Christiansen, a business expert, who is in charge of branding at Visit Greenland.

That former marketing message is one she now dismisses as “undifferentiated” and “unmemorable.”

In 2012, Visit Greenland relaunched Greenland as a “pioneer location,” a place where Inuit, Vikings and Danes came as pioneers, and where tourists can now be “a pioneer”— which is how most visitors to the Arctic think of themselves, Christiansen said.

Visit Greenland is also trying to increase its visibility and its accessibility, through tapping into segmented markets like cruise ship visitors, adventure tourists and extreme tourists.

And Greenland needs new areas for growth — there’s no more room for travelers from Denmark in the summer because the airplanes are already flying full, Christiansen said.

But there’s room to attract more visitors to Greenland via Iceland, which operates flights to East Greenland, and through Nunavut, which starting this summer, will see a twice-weekly Air Greenland flight between Nuuk and Iqaluit.

To lure people — and the right kinds of visitors — Visit Greenland has a new website, which attracts 600,000 visitors a year, half from North America.

The website addresses stereotypes people may have about Greenland, Christiansen said.

Links to photos and videos show the culture and people who hunt whales and seal. It makes no attempt to hide Greenland’s lack of infrastructure, which makes a trip there “not a luxury experience by any means.”

The goal is for people to see “Greenland for what it is, and don’t come with the wrong expectations.”

But first you have to people to know what Greenland is, Christiansen said, and that “this is a place you can travel to.”

You need to get them to open the file “in their mind,” then get them to start thinking, “this is a place I’d like to go to.”

Then, you give them the “inspiration to go” and show how to make bookings, Christiansen said at the tourism conference.

You can find that information on the website, where you can chose what you want to do in Greenland, when you want to do it and then learn where you should go.

Visit Greenland also maintains Facebook pages, a Twitter presence, and it’s even produced about 200 hours of a television show with food and travel stories about Greenland, programs which have been told to 45 countries and shown on BBC world.

That cost a lot to make — more than Visit Greenland’s $3-million-a-year budget, but it’s also provided a stock of high quality material to Visit Greenland, Christiansen said.

At home, Visit Tourism is working on getting people in Greenland more involved in tourism and gaining more access to places, such as its large national park in northeastern Greenland, which remains inaccessible.

Greenland doesn’t see itself as being in competition with Nunavut.

The two destinations are both in an Arctic, but have a different look, she said.

“It would be a great experience to see both,” said Christiansen, who took time during the conference to speak with Nunavut Tourism and other conference participants about that possibility.

Here’s a look at one of the videos Greenland posts on its website: