Costa Brava, Catalunya and Instagram

By Steve Keenan

Yesterday, the 46,000th photo was posted on Instagram using the hashtag #incostabrava. How long did it take to reach that number? One year, more or less - that’s all. Or put it another way, at a rate of around 1,000 photos a week.

This week will see another fresh batch of images, as the Costa Brava and Catalunya Tourist Boards jointly host six British parent bloggers in a trip co-hosted by Travel Perspective. You can see five images on the right from the bloggers on their first day, in Girona.

Collecting differing views of a region is, well, nice for the hosting region. But it’s proving much more than that. By harnessing visiting media and local enthusiasts, Costa Brava and Catalunya have built a huge image bank of their region seen through thousands of different pairs of eyes.

Jaume Marin, marketing manager for Costa Brava, says the two tourist boards have now run more than 25 blog trips and/or competitions using Instagram. One finishes this week, challenging residents to win a highly-prized day (for three) inside the kitchens of El Celler de Can Roca, the Girona restaurant voted best in the world last month.

But they are now ingrained as a way of encouraging communities to think social. In May and June alone, nine villages or towns will run Instagram competitions with nominal prizes to best show off their community. This Saturday, it will be Cadaques.

While Costa Brava primarily thinks locally, parent promotion board Catalunya thinks globally. In mid-June, it will again invite 10 international Instagrammers from seven countries, with a combined following of 1.3m people, to spend six days snapping the region. This is serious promotion, for relatively little budget (nobody is paid to visit).

Marin uses Instagram images of the region on his business cards, always emailing the photographer and asking for permission, who he then credits on the cards. The region also uses images for promotional purposes, again with permission. And it even gives out Instagram pins per challenge, inevitably now collector items.

And do you know what? Nobody has ever said no - because they all want to promote where they live and are chuffed to bits that they can help. It’s a fascinating psychology, with Marin orchestrating and billing those contributors as ‘heroes’ who do the actually promoting.

It’s also a very effective way of getting the residents of a region to ‘buy into’ social media, by engaging and enlisting their help. And it’s not confined to Costa Brava and Catalunya - Scotland is another to have benefitted from such willingness to share.

At World Travel Market last November, Visit Scotland’s social media manager, Simone Kurtzke, said that she ran a photo competition last year – which generated as many images for official use as Visit Scotland had managed to collect in the previous 40 years. “People are saying use my images. It’s like an open door,” she said.

Since starting to write this, another 23 images have been hashtagged #incostabrava and by the end of this week, there will be hundreds more from the parent bloggers adding their take on what the region has to offer families.

Who knows, they may also end up as ‘heroes’ - maybe even with one of their images on Jaume’s business cards. If they’re lucky.

Instagram photos by FamilyAffairs, SteveKeenan, MarkFrary, FamilyAdventureProject.

Follow the Costa Brava Parent Bloggers trip on Storify and on the Costa Brava/Catalunya Storify site