The third in my series of posts profiling small tourism operators looks at Bright Brewery in Victoria’s High Country.

The brewery uses fresh mountain water, local ingredients and craft brewing techniques to produce a range of beers. As well as being open every day for drinks and meals, and offering tasting tours, the iconic experience is the Brewer for a Day event.

While their key target markets are within Australia, Bright Brewery’s Fiona Reddaway believes this energetic experience is substantial enough to attract overseas visitors in its own right.

“We’re talking with Tourism Victoria about the most suitable markets, and the ways to reach these markets,” she told me.

One vital strategy has been to create packages and full experiences. For example, the Brewery has been working with other microbreweries and local tourism authorities in North East Victoria to create Victoria’s High Country Beer Trail - an initiative that packages the diverse beer experiences of this cluster of microbreweries set in stunning locations.

Bright Brewery’s local packages include accommodation and have been publicised in the print media through North East Victoria Tourism Inc. (NEVTi), which has promoted Brewer for a Day at Bright Brewery as one of the top five High Country experiences.

“We are working with organisations like NEVTi to promote the Brewery Trail as well as Brewer for a Day to international visitors, and to tap into Tourism Victoria programs currently targeting the international market,” said Fiona.

The overseas market for Bright Brewery is interesting - committed beer lovers from Europe, Japan and New Zealand who are predominantly male and in their 30s-50s.

Publicity has helped get the word out and is highly valued by the team, with a segment on Getaway that was aired around the world driving more traffic to the Bright Brewery website. The bulk of bookings for the Brewer for a Day experience have come through email marketing to the Brew Crew subscribers, with some arriving via online search.

The Bright Brewery website works well - it’s easy to see what experiences are available, how to book them, and how to subscribe to the Brew Crew newsletter.

So the core overseas marketing strategies chosen by Bright Brewery are:

• Work with regional and state tourism organisations to glean advice and tap into promotional programs.
• Work collaboratively with other operators to create full experiences and packages.
• Pursue publicity through print and broadcast media.
• Market online to an opt-in email list and funnel site visitors into bookings.

The recent Tourism Directions & Distribution Conference in Sydney brought to light some important changes taking place in the tourism industry, which put you as a small tourism operator in much bigger shoes.

Giving the keynote address was Anna Pollock of Desticorp, whose views caught my attention and led me to read the white papers published on her site.

In describing the rapidly disintegrating travel distribution model of the 20th century, she lists three groups of providers:

1. Large global and national distributors, including wholesalers, ITOs, airlines and hotel chains
2. Systems providers and intermediaries, such as Galileo and Sabre, which include only the larger corporate suppliers in their databases, and
3. “The rest! Hundreds of thousands of small to medium-sized enterprises [SMEs] located throughout the globe that offer both direct travel-related services (accommodation, dining, transport, recreation and entertainment) and ancillary services (insurance, software, content, finance, weather, news, maps etc).”

I put the last point in quotes because these are Anna’s words, and it’s this large group of providers who are putting together the new model of distribution, which functions primarily online.

Anna goes on to say that this group is “waiting and ready for affordable, flexible, practical solutions that can connect them to a global market of demanding, capricious and valuable consumers hungry for the new, the unusual, the unique and boutique” (my emphasis).

If you sat up and said to yourself - that’s me - you’d be right. Small tourism enterprises have a huge amount to gain from the new distribution model that’s emerging across the world.

Says Anna: “There’s a revolution brewing that threatens to crumble the edifices of the corporate world.” (Don’t we all love to hear that?)

She’s talking about the same revolution described by Chris Anderson in “The Long Tail”. Chris explains that the ability you now have as a niche business to sell directly to prospects across the globe via the Internet means you can siphon off your corner of the market from larger businesses without depending on centralised distribution channels.

The problem for wholesalers translating a top-down model onto the Internet is that large, faceless sites, which are little more than a directory-cum-booking-engine, can’t interact, respond quickly to change or engage users with their personality and depth.

The threat to wholesalers comes from you - and others like you - the more focused sites and distribution systems (the brokers described by Anna Pollock), which are able to:

• beat the generic sites in the search rankings through authoritative content in a niche area,
• build trust and engage users through strategic blogging,
• maintain a personal conversation through targeted email marketing, and
• provide a fuller service through partnership with industry affiliates.