On behalf of the Norwegian Ministry for Trade, Industry and Fisheries, Menon Economics has assessed the aggregate effort related to profiling and marketing Norway as a tourist destination. We estimate that the Norwegian tourism industry is marketed for NOK 1 billion in operational funding in 2016, whereof NOK 550 million is spent on marketing Norway abroad. Innovation Norway provides approximately a quarter of the funds spent on marketing Norway abroad.

The purpose of the assignment is to get a better understanding of whether the destination profiling for Norway is organized appropriately. In order to answer this question, Menon analyzes the synergies between the publicly financed efforts to profile Norway as a tourist destination, and other activities. Our assessment is that there are particularly strong synergies between destination profiling activities and other marketing efforts of Norwegian tourism products. These synergies can best be realized by organizing the public destination profiling as a separate, independent unit, with broad and varied interfaces and close coordination with the individual groups of actors in the tourism industry, such as the regional companies for the promotion of tourism, destination marketing companies, and large and small tourism enterprises throughout the whole country.

The full report (in Norwegian language) can be downloaded here.