How to attract Danish city break tourists to Helsinki - a study on how Helsinki can excel in attracting Danish city break tourists.

Abstract

The possibilities and prospects of Helsinki as a city break destination for Danes are researched and evaluated in this thesis. As Copenhagen, Denmark sees a bigger influx of leisure tourism from Finland, compared to leisure tourism in Helsinki, Finland from Denmark, the aim of the study is to capture perceptions and evaluate the prospects and current efforts towards the Danish source market from stakeholders in the tourism industry of Helsinki. The study focuses only on city break tourism in Helsinki. Thus, other Finnish tourism destinations, such as Lapland, are not studied. The theoretical framework consists of theories of destination branding, city break tourism, visitor attractions, motivational push-pull factors and the tourist consumer decision making processes. The data of the study is gathered qualitatively, through semi-structured interviews with stakeholders and destination management organization of Helsinki. The data is categorized and further analyzed to find themes and capture key aspects for the discussion and presented as results of the study. The results are then discussed with an offset in the theories and models of the theoretical framework, to draw the conclusions of the study. The author concludes that there are possibilities for increasing Danish city break tourism in Helsinki, but that efforts should be put in place to develop Helsinki as a niche destination. This could be done by communicating the unique selling points and destination brand positioning to attract the right niche target group. This would require some efforts in branding and generating awareness of Helsinki as a leisure tourism destination for city breakers.