More and more tourism destinations in Asia, the governments behind them and private operators running tour packages and services are realising the importance of online promotion. We’re seeing a large increase of familiarisation trips, designed to attract bloggers and key influencers to promoted destinations across Asia.

What’s interesting is how these bloggers and influencers then act as the main promotional channels for the destinations. Their seemingly personal blogs are garnering lots of traffic – and their social media profiles are flooded with user engagement. How do they cope with a larger, international audience?

The Shift to Cloud Hosting

One of the most apparent trend among Asia’s top travel bloggers is the massive shift to Cloud hosting. Blogging is turning into a serious occupation – and a big business – for these bloggers, which is why they are strengthening their websites to handle more traffic.
Cloud hosting is indeed the right technology for the purpose. More server resources can be allocated for each site, allowing even the most feature-intensive blogs to handle millions of visitors with ease.

Another interesting trend is bloggers moving their sites to foreign servers or using CDNs to reach international viewers. Companies like bestwebhosting.co.uk are reporting an increase in Asia-based travel sites using their servers to penetrate UK and European markets.

More Financial Backings to Match

As mentioned previously, blogging is no longer something these travel bloggers do on the side. There are even American and European bloggers who now specialise in exploring Asia. Nomadic Matt, for instance, is a famous blog about traveling to Asia run by a New York Times Best Seller author born in Boston.

The market is growing rapidly, just as the market for tourism in Asia is growing rapidly. Governments and their programmes are pushing tourism forward. More money is being allocated for online promotions and a large portion of that goes towards building relationships with travel bloggers and popular websites.

The growing business means it is now rewarding to blog fulltime and stick to travel as the primary niche. We haven’t even begun to talk about how private companies and service providers endorse – and pay – travel bloggers to promote their services too.

New Destinations to Explore

One of the challenges of running a big blog is keeping the audience happy. To do that, you need to constantly provide your audience with valuable content. Thanks to the growing tourism industry across Asia, there is no shortage of new destinations to explore.

Indonesia, for instance, is introducing 16 new destinations to visit. Malaysia continues to promote places like Kuala Lumpur as the centre of Asia. Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, and other Asian countries are following suit, opening their gates to more international travellers.

The market will only continue to grow. It is interesting to see how blogs that used to be about personal notes and journals are now competing with big publications and becoming more effective ways of promoting tourism in Asia. Soon, we’ll see another shift towards live blogging and videos too, especially now that video is dominating the content market.