The Tourism Authority of Thailand will reveal today the winners of its Wannabe a Star competition that offers agents the chance to attend a free educational to Thailand and feature in an agent training video on the destination.
The six lucky agents will travel on May 11-20 to Bangkok before pairing off and travelling to different parts of the country – Chiang Mai, Pattaya and Phuket.
Each pair will be given an easy-to-use digital camcorder to film – video diary style – their experiences and reactions to the country. The end result will be a 25min training video which will form part of a 1hr training session on Thailand that will be available to UK travel agents in autumn 1999.
TAT marketing manager UK and Ireland Chris Lee said: “There are currently two courses run by the Pacific Asia Travel Association and East Asia Travel Association to train agents on Thailand. Both are good but only attract around 500 agents each.
“We want the training to hit the masses – there are around 50,000 agents in this country and to reach them we needed to take a different tack.
“We believe the TV medium is the best way to reach this particular age group and if we get them to film the video agent to agent it will have a much more powerful affect.”
The production of the video is costing over ú30,000. It is being funded by Thai Airways and the Tourism Authority of Thailand, with selected tour operators paying for distribution within their agency chains.