Cheeky newspaper ad helps put 'Tasmania on the map' with nod to Queen Mary
A full-page advert featured in a Danish newspaper this week encouraging Danes to head down under to Australia.
It’s official. Tasmania has hit the world stage and found international fame following a sneaky tourism newspaper ad encouraging Danish locals to ‘come down’ to Australia’s famous island state.
“Down here our views are fit for a Queen. Just ask yours,” reads the full-page feature in Danish newspaper Politiken this week, courtesy of Tourism Tasmania in light of Mary’s rise to the Queen of Denmark.
Speaking to Yahoo News News Australia on Wednesday, Tourism Tasmania CEO Sarah Clark said the team “saw a great opportunity to celebrate and support Mary” who was born in Hobart before meeting her future husband King Frederik and moving across the world.
“It also really puts across a cheeky message in our Tasmanian tone of voice,” she said.
Europeans expected to book a trip down under
The ad is part of a larger tourism campaign – ‘Come Down For Air' — which “showcases our beautiful Tassie scenery”. Another version of the ad also features in papers locally. “Becoming Queen. The only decent excuse for leaving,” it read.
While Australia as a whole has “always been a really popular destination for European travellers”, Clark said she hopes the advert, along with Queen Mary’s rise to fame, will help “create further awareness for Tasmania”.
“Tassie is, I guess, quite a remote destination for Europeans or even Americans and so it definitely will help put it on the map a little bit more,” she said. “It also creates that emotional connection to Tasmania and encourages people to take a look into what Tasmania is all about and then hopefully in time book a trip to come down and visit.”
Clarke said locals in Tassie are “quite respectful” of Queen Mary and her family's privacy, and noted she's not the state’s main drawcard. Instead, visitors are encouraged to “really experience the food and beautiful wine and nature environment that we offer”.
Tourism in Tasmania expected to boom
While the Covid pandemic “threw a spanner in the works” in terms of domestic and international travel, with the virus ceasing travel temporarily across the globe, “Tasmania fared quite well” with Aussies flocking to the domestic destination during the “Covid recovery phase,” Clark said.
“It's taken longer for international travellers to filter back into Australia and so we're sitting at around 70 per cent recovered at the moment,” she said. “But the outlook looks really good.
"We've really seen a drive from the US and European countries coming back into Australia and Tasmania. Where we're seeing the lag more so is the slower recovery out of China and Hong Kong”.
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