Saba Tourist Office Launches New Tourism Identity and Website

The Saba Tourist Office launched a brand new island identity and website on Monday, December 2. The new logo is colorful and vibrant and instantly reveals elements of the natural environment that the island is known for, while the new website gives persons interested in traveling to the island up to date information about the destination.

Director of Tourism, Glenn Holm outlined Saba’s use of the internet as a marketing tool, which began in 1996, with a two page website. The Tourism Office soon realized that this could be could be the biggest channel for marketing Saba to the “curious and unknowing outside world.” This led to the first significant redesign and the domain name sabatourism.com in 2001. In 2012 it was time to for another redesign, this time using the services of local graphic designer Malachy Magee, who had already designed websites for local hotels and dive shops. Marketing the island has taken another course, with the use of social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, which is essential in today’s connected world. Early indications point to this being a big success.

The logo and identity launch is the culmination of a process that began over year ago that was intended to differentiate the island from the many other destinations in the region. Graphic Designer Malachy Magee, explained in a presentation to the stakeholders at the launch that the idea was to highlight the things that make Saba unique, which is that it is “safe, fun and friendly.” He also elucidated on the use of the tagline- Your island adventure awaits…-, which incorporates “adventure” into the theme, because adventure tourism is very popular right now, and while Saba is a small island, there are many adventures to encounter on the island; and it starts from the time a visitor boards their ferry or aircraft to get to the island.

He emphasized that the new approach has paid off, and could be seen through the increased traffic to the website during the testing period. He produced figures which indicated that traffic to the website during the month of November of this year had almost doubled from an average of 160 unique visitors a day during the same time last year to 299 unique visitors. In addition to that, visitors to the site were spending more time browsing around the site and viewing an average of four pages. This he said indicated a high level of interest compared to other tourism based websites on the island which are averaging only one page view per visitor.

Other tourism based websites on the island could also benefit from the increased traffic to the website by posting their activities on the websites Activities page, which has reached up to 10,000 people in one week he also explained.

Commissioner of Tourism, Chris Johnson, in his remarks said that Executive Council chose this week to officially launch the website because it ties in with the celebration of Saba Day. He also explained that using the internet is another way opening up Saba to the world, just as the airport which is celebrating 50 years this year opened Saba to receive more visitors.

After the launch of the website, T-shirts with the new logo were handed out to the attendees. These T-Shirts will be the official Saba Day T-Shirts for this year.

GIS Saba, December 3, 2013