Melbourne Remote Control Tourist Campaign – a Great Result

The week-long Remote Control Tourist campaign, launched on Wednesday 9 October has been a great success.

The four cyclists, visited 321 businesses, travelled (rode or walked) 109 kilometers, received 8,700 requests and recorded over 80 hours of unique Melbourne footage.

Minister for Tourism and Major Events Louise Asher said she was delighted with the response to this latest stage of the Play Melbourne campaign, a world-first in tourism marketing.

“Since its launch, the Melbourne Remote Control Tourist has attracted a global audience, even though it was primarily aimed at Sydney, Brisbane and New Zealand and the initial results have been extremely encouraging,” Ms Asher said.

“People from over 158 countries and 3,888 cities checked out the website during the five days attracting more than 103,000 hits and over 150,000 visits to YouTube videos so far.

“There’s also been extensive international media coverage for the uniqueness of the campaign which has been a great advertisement for Melbourne.”

Positive sentiment for the campaign in social media was exceptionally high at 96%, with consumers tweeting comments such as “Love this idea, the remote control tourist, brilliantly simple, makes me want to go to Melbourne.”

“A legacy of the initiative is the amazing array and original nature of the footage and images of Melbourne that have been captured during the live period. This will be used as part of the ongoing Play Melbourne campaign which runs through to June next year along with other marketing opportunities,” Ms Asher said.

Now that the five day live period is complete potential visitors can still see recorded highlights of the visits along with information on all of the featured destinations.

Ms Asher said this campaign adds to the great domestic tourist numbers to Melbourne which increased by 2.9 per cent to reach 7.1 million in the year ending last June.

She said Melbourne is now the most preferred holiday destination for Australians with 21.5 percent wanting to holiday here within the next two years.

Ms Asher said tourism to Victoria is worth $19.1 billion, and employs more than 200,000 people.