Lloret de Mar, 28 June 2017.– With respect, we all fit in Lloret, a new public behaviour campaign aimed at strengthening relations between local residents and tourists, was unveiled this lunchtime at Lloret de Mar’s Town Hall. The goal of the initiative, which is already being rolled out at various locations in the town, is to foster good relations in Lloret on the basis of a positive, relaxed approach that focuses on striking a balance between the needs of local residents and tourists by getting both groups to wear the same T-shirt.
According to the Mayor of Lloret de Mar, Jaume Dulsat, “What we’re seeing right now is that various cities are affected by the tourist phobia phenomenon. Tourism is the economic engine of Lloret de Mar and we’ve always been an open, welcoming town; we don’t want that to change, which is why we feel the need to implement initiatives such as this campaign, focusing on the shared responsibility of local residents and visitors and showing that, with respect, we all fit in our town.”
The need to carry out actions that strengthen relations between local residents and tourists was one of the points listed in the Lloret de Mar Strategic Tourism Plan 2010-2014 and also features in the Lloret de Mar Tourism Renewal Plan 2015-2020. Furthermore, one of the conclusions reached by the 2015 Rethink Lloret initiative, in which citizens were invited to attend workshops to analyse the tourism future of the town, was the need to promote a positive local attitude towards tourists and to carry out actions to promote good relations between the two groups.
Lloret, MAKE IT yours
For the last two years, Lloret Town Council has been implementing campaigns designed to improve how the destination is perceived and to break down stereotypes associated with the town, such as the “Come on. Experience it. Share Lloret” campaign in 2014 or the “Lloret, the way I like it” campaign in 2015. These campaigns were aimed at a Catalan audience with the goal of repositioning the brand. As Jaume Dulsat explains, “In recent years we’ve worked hard on communicating with potential visitors from the nearby market, which as we see it is where the stereotypes are most deeply ingrained. But we also realised that we needed to make an effort to communicate with visitors once they’re here.”
Lloret de Mar is now launching a medium-term initiative, scheduled to run for two years, which targets end users by repositioning the brand, highlighting the diversity of what the destination has to offer and fostering an enriching relationship between local residents and tourists. The Lloret, MAKE IT yours campaign is designed to create a sense of belonging, of feeling at home.
“With respect, we all fit in Lloret” summer public behaviour campaign
This public behaviour campaign is the first initiative to be launched under the Lloret, MAKE IT yours umbrella campaign.
“Respect” is the buzzword of a campaign aimed at making everyone feel at home in Lloret: early risers and night owls, music lovers and silence seekers. As the Mayor of Lloret points out, “Lloret is a destination with a long tourism tradition where people of more than 100 nationalities come together; it’s a town with plenty of resilience but we need to foster good relations and mutual respect.”
The campaign, in full force on the streets of Lloret de Mar from today, is directly related to the Enjoy & Respect campaign implemented in 2012 in the wake of the disturbances that occurred in August 2011. There are some differences between the two campaigns, however. Jaume Dulsat says that “this campaign is fresher and friendlier, seeking to engage both visitors and local residents by generating empathy and shared responsibility, steering clear of the issue of penalties.”
With this new initiative, Lloret de Mar aims to establish friendly relations with the people who visit the destination. It wants local residents to feel proud of their town and to overcome prejudices, enabling a feeling of belonging to come to the fore.
The goal of the campaign is for local residents and tourists alike to feel proud of Lloret, for everyone to enjoy the town in their own way but learning to share it on the basis of respect.
The campaign has a wide target audience, encompassing visitors who come to spend a few days in the town in high season and local residents, along with businesses and the main agents of the tourism sector, who can join the campaign.
Put your T-shirt on
The key element for the dissemination of the campaign is a T-shirt, which in this initiative serves as a vehicle to foster good relations and respect. The goal is to make local residents and tourists feel part of the same team by wearing the same T-shirt. The campaign is a fun and friendly way of focusing on the need for tourists to realise that they need to put their T-shirts on when they leave the beach, an issue that affects the town and is one of the main symbols of the negative perceptions surrounding tourism. The T-shirt is also one of the key elements for generating a sense of community.
Lloret de Mar Town Council has produced 10,000 T-shirts that display messages related to the campaign goal. The attractively designed, modern T-shirts display fun and friendly images with phrases in Catalan and English that play with opposites and with which both local residents and tourists can identify and make the campaign their own, whatever their profile: night versus day, silence versus music, nightlife versus daytime activities.
This is mainly a street-based campaign in order to achieve a real connection with local residents and visitors. In this respect, and in addition to publicising the initiative through various advertising displays (lamp post banners, totem stands…), the area where people need to put their T-shirts on has also been delimited from today. This street marketing action marks out a symbolic line with the words “Put your T-shirt on” at the edge of the seafront promenade and at the entrances to the shopping area as a fun and relaxed way of informing people of the zones in which they can walk around without a T-shirt and promoting its use.
An information point has also been set up featuring a giant T-shirt that displays the campaign messages. The goal is for local residents and visitors to take photos there and share them on social networks in exchange for a T-shirt, becoming ambassadors of the campaign.
Tourism in Lloret. The figures.
Last year, Lloret de Mar welcomed 1,288,098 visitors and registered a total of 5,884,557 overnight stays in hotels. The main nationalities of visitors to the destination are Spanish, French, British and German. It’s the 5th-ranked sun and sand destination in Spain in terms of hotel bed spaces. Furthermore, Lloret de Mar was the second-ranked destination in Catalonia in 2015 for tourist tax revenue with €2,639,688.12, only surpassed by the city of Barcelona.
Lloret de Mar has 120 hotel establishments with approximately 30,000 hotel bed spaces. 60% of the town’s hotel accommodation offering is concentrated in hotels with three stars or more, while 64% of the five-star and luxury hotel accommodation on the Costa Brava is located in Lloret de Mar.
In addition to hotel bed spaces, there are also four campsites in Lloret, de Mar with 1,337 camping pitches and 4,011 bed spaces; 12 holiday apartment blocks with 1,140 bed places; and 2,616 private dwellings registered for tourist use with an estimated total of 15,860 bed places.
