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million leaflets and other visitor literature, and handled more than 73 000 enquiries through various channels, including the Visitor Hotline.
The www.discoverhongkong.com consumer website now receives more than 24 million page views per month. To help visitors make the most of their stay in Hong Kong, the HKTB introduced a new web-based Interactive Itinerary Planner in April. The service enables visitors to tailor itineraries according to their needs and interests prior to arrival, and is available in English, Traditional and Simplified Chinese.
Marketing
The HKTB keeps a diversified portfolio of visitors to Hong Kong. HKTB campaigns in 2007 paid special attention to 19 major tourist markets which together accounted for about 93 per cent of the total number of visitors to Hong Kong. The HKTB adopts a flexible and integrated approach to reaching different markets and meeting their needs, using electronic and print media advertising, trade and consumer promotions, trade and media events, online marketing and public relations campaigns.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region of China, the HKTB launched a series of promotional activities. One of these was the '10-Year-Old Little Journalists' programme organised jointly with a national teenagers' magazine on the Mainland. One hundred Mainland primary school students, all born in 1997, came to Hong Kong for five days during which they acted as journalists reporting their Hong Kong experiences.
Other major events included the Hong Kong Shopping Festival, which ran from June to August, and a community programme entitled '50 Years of Tourism: Creating Milestones Together', which ran from July to December. The latter programme comprised a host of activities, including roving exhibitions, public competitions and a seminar reviewing the industry's achievements and challenges.
The HKTB started rolling out a series of equestrian-related activities in June to promote the Olympic equestrian event which will be held in Hong Kong in August 2008. Campaigns were also launched in countries where the sport is popular, such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
The HKTB organised for the first time a spectacular event called 'A Symphony of Lights New Year Countdown' with pyrotechnic and special lighting effects which lit up the night sky over Victoria Harbour to celebrate the arrival of 2008.
Meetings, Incentive Travels, Conventions and Exhibitions (MICE)
Hong Kong is widely recognised as the conventions and exhibitions capital of Asia and it continues to attract top international events to its shores.
This sector continued to perform well in 2007 with the staging of about 300 conventions and exhibitions, bringing in more than 850 000 visitors. One of the year's major events was the Asian Aerospace International Expo & Congress, the world's largest commercial aerospace and civil aviation event. The four-day event attracted over 11 000 visitors from 69 countries.