Swiss tourism ‘bailed out’ by Muslim travelers as figures are set to double

(Photo: Interlaken, Switzerland / Boris-B / Shutterstock.com)

Switzerland’s tourism has been hit hard by the global travel slowdown.

The Swiss Federal Statistical Office’s latest figures show that 44 percent of the country’s tourism source--made up of individual nations and regions, have seen arrival numbers drop between 2013 and 2014.

However, in that same time period, the number of Muslim tourists arriving from Gulf nations has risen by 20 percent, and according to Swiss tourism officials, this figure is on course to almost double by 2016, offsetting the loss made elsewhere.

ONE MILLION GCC TOURISTS BY 2016

“I want one million overnight stays from Gulf nations by 2016, and I think we are already very close to that,” says Matthias Albrecht, director of Swiss tourism in the Gulf Cooperation Council region.

The overnight stays in Switzerland by GCC tourists numbered 623,205 in 2013, and rose to 770,725 in 2014.

Now, Albrecht says, it is already closing in on a million stays for 2015.

This 48 percent increase in just over two years means Switzerland is well on course to double its Muslim guests overnight stays-- a figure that includes tourists from other Muslim nations like Malaysia.

The importance of Muslim tourists for Switzerland cannot be understated.

Of the top five countries with the greatest increase in visitors to Switzerland in 2014, three are Muslim nations; the Korean Republic, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Belarus.

This is one of the main reasons the central European nation’s focus on Muslim travelers has grown year on year. In fact, the country famed for its blue lakes and mountains set up an office in Dubai all the way back in 2003.

Just a few years after this, in 2009, Switzerland made headlines for all the wrong reasons across the Muslim world as it announced its infamous “minaret ban,” a constitutional amendment approved by a majority of Swiss voters, that barred construction of new minarets on mosques.

These days things are very different, and Muslim tourists are now likely to be greeted at many Swiss hotels with a salaam and a Muslim goody basket.

“We believe little bits of knowledge about Muslim culture and lifestyle can make a huge difference,” Albrecht said. “We have been doing some language training, so that hospitality staff know some basic things like how to respond to ‘assalamualaikum’ for example.

“We also encourage our hotels to greet Muslim customers with a basket of essentials, like a Qur’an, prayer mat, compass, a jar of honey, and other things that will make their stay comfortable,” he added, explaining that this is all part of a marketing strategy, called the “Four Wheel Drive,” designed to better target the GCC Muslim customer.

MARKETING STRATEGY

The first ‘wheel’ in the strategy focuses on business to business relations and involves Albrecht taking 40 tourism partners from Switzerland on an annual road show—dubbed the “Switzerland Travel Experience”— across four Muslim countries, (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar), and into 14 cities where they make presentations to 1,400 local travel agents.

Then, Albrecht invites several GCC travel agents back to Switzerland, with the tourism board picking up the tab. “We take them to Switzerland to show them the beauty of Switzerland; it is important that we do that as nothing is easier to sell than when you have seen it and experienced it.”

The second and third wheel are traditional media management and promotion, but it is the fourth wheel, focusing on electronic and social media, that demonstrates the Swiss tourist board’s commitment to the halal travel sector.

MySwitzerland.com, the official web site for Switzerland’s tourism board is one of the largest Arabic language tourism websites by a non-Arab nation, anywhere in the world, Albrecht said. It contains 2,400 pages translated into Arabic and is now supported by a social media team posting in Arabic on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Together, says Albrecht, these posts make a powerful engagement tool for potential halal tourists. “For us it was very important that if we do it, we do it right.”

“Social media here in the Arab world is very important, but you have to have something behind it,” he said. “So when people click on a photo they should be linked to something which is speaking about it as well, and goes a bit deeper than just one sentence in Arabic. We can now capitalise on this and we see that it is growing.”

MORE MUSLIM-FRIENDLY SERVICES

This effort to deliver more Muslim-friendly services is increasingly being reinforced by providers back in Switzerland.

Every year in the run up to Ramadan for example, many hotels across Switzerland offer special services to Muslims.

This means hotel kitchens open and serve food in line with suhoor - the start of the fast at sunrise, and iftar - the breaking of the fast at sunset.

Service staff tend to know the direction of the Qibla, and some hotels even set aside a private, chapel-like room for prayer.

Nor does it end there.

“We have in Interlaken, for example, female paragliding pilots who will travel with the (Muslim) woman in the air.

“We have a halal cruise on Lake Brienz as well, this is something special for the GCC customer, obviously we have a lot of restaurants who offer halal food,” Albrecht says.

With the average Muslim GCC tourist spending almost three times more than their European counterpart, it is easy to see why a nation that refuses planning permission for minarets is still willing to plan for travelling Muslims.

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