It was a great honour for Greenland when its tourism board, Visit Greenland, on Tuesday won a Webby People's Voice Award, also known as the Oscars of the Internet, for their self-produced video "The Future of Travel in Greenland". The video was part of the storytelling in Visit Greenland's staycation campaign, the purpose of which is to get Greenlanders to be tourists in their own country. Additionally, Visit Greenland won an honorary mention from the Webby jury in the category Travel websites and mobile sites for the landing page, “Dive deeper into our world”.
Visit Greenland won in the category "Video: Travel and Adventure", where they were up against strong competitors, such as New Zealand's tourism marketing organisation, Tourism New Zealand, and CNN. In this category, Visit Greenland's video was selected from 13,500 entries from 70 different countries.
“We at Visit Greenland are incredibly proud of this award. It shows that if you have a good story and show great creativity and ingenuity, you can triumph over competitors who have access to much larger budgets and expensive agencies. This is a learning experience that we will take with us when are working to attract even more tourists to our beautiful country in the future”, says a happy and satisfied Hjörtur Smarason, director of Visit Greenland, who explains that the video has been viewed thousands of times on YouTube and other social media. He continues:
“Greenland looks forward to receiving tourists again, once the population has been vaccinated. We are working hard to offer new, sustainable products to the many tourists who want to experience an Arctic country that is continually experiencing climatic changes.”
The Webby Awards have been widely discussed in leading global media such as the New York Times, the BBC and the Washington Post.
The prestigious prize was received virtually due to the current pandemic situation.
Winning speech in five words
“The Future’s Not for Sale” says Visit Greenland employee Ivaana Olsen, in Visit Greenland's five-word video-recorded Webby Award acceptance speech. The words refer to the sacrifices that the tourism industry has had to make in order to save human lives during COVID-19. There have not been any COVID-19 related deaths registered in Greenland, and only 31 people have been infected. The short speech also refers to the Greenlandic Government's focus on responsible and sustainable tourism. Greenland is one of the countries where climate change comes to a climax, with average temperature increases that are twice as high as the average for the whole world. The winning video was created to encourage Greenlanders to travel around their own country while there were restrictions on international flights and travel.
For more information on the Webby Awards - see: The internet’s highest honour
Watch Visit Greenland's acceptance speech here.
Link to our Honorary Mention here.
