COOK ISLANDS NEXT TO SIGN ON TO BUILD THE BIGGEST PHOTO LIBRARY IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

The Cook Islands Tourism Corporation (CITC) is the latest national tourism authority to join our plan to build the largest on-line photo library on the entire South Pacific (featuring, of course, the Cook islands).

Vanuatu signed up last month. Three other countries are in the pipeline.

Our intention is to involve all 16 countries in the region – prioritising the tourism authorities who recognise the benefits and value of the association.

The new initiative sees the CITC gaining unlimited access to thousands of high quality photographs in our commercial photo library (www.davidkirklandphotography.com) for promotional purposes. It also sees savings of at least 50% being passed on to local tourism operators who purchase images through our library’s Tourism Industry Assistance Scheme (TIAS).

“It’s a no brainer,” said the organisation’s marketing manager, Karla Eggelton, recognising the distribution of thousands of appealing images of the Cook Islands worldwide will contribute to elevating the country’s profile, and that it will benefit local tourism operators who will gain access to a wide range of reasonably priced, high quality promotional photographs of the destination to promote their own businesses (the average price of a photograph is between AUD$50 and AUD$200 an image).

Additional benefits of the association include:

– A bigger, broader photo library of the Cook Islands: David has since committed to significantly expanding the range of photographs in the Cook Islands Gallery of his library to ensure it meets the organisation’s, and the local industry’s, future marketing needs (more than 300 images are likely to be uploaded at the end of his current assignment).

– Capacity Building: A single CITC staff member will be “taken under wing” and tutored personally by David in tourism photography during his visits (hopefully creating a network of country-based tourism photographers throughout the region).

– Platform for local photographers: The opportunity will be created for local Cook Island photographers to add their images to the library and sell them worldwide.

– Promotional photo Library for media and travel agents: David’s company specialises in building on-line photo libraries, customised to the needs of national tourism authorities. Such libraries are built to be self-managed by the tourism authority and to run parallel – and independently – to our commercial library.

– High quality souvenir book: David’s company has published 15 successful souvenir books. The association will see the publication of a new, hard cover souvenir book on the Cook Islands in 2018, drawing from the best of the images uploaded to our library.