Putting a price on free advertising

Often, for all your efforts on paid advertising, it's the free publicity that surpasses it.

We're very fortunate in Dominica to have a tourism product that carries with it an inbuilt 'wow' factor: our unspoiled natural beauty inspires so many people. So for all our efforts in the marketplace - trade shows, magazine adverts, online marketing, one good magazine article so often exceeds the exposure we pay for.

Of late Dominica has got rave reviews in many publications - and one such caused the above peak in traffic to an accommodation website featured in the article - a 3,000% increase, for minimal cost. And this is just one of many, fairly regular, good reviews.

While quite often it's true there's no such thing as bad publicity - last year's earthquake and Hurricane Dean turned the spotlight on us briefly, and we bounced back quickly from the damage of Dean - anything that damages the key perception of our island will damage that free publicity we so need.