Croatian Tourist Board SPAMGate: Update and Can I Transparently Publish the Results?

May 19, 2020 – An update to TCN’s mailshot to Croatia’s 319 tourists boards, and am I allowed to publish the results transparently?

My recent article What Happens When 319 Croatian Tourist Boards Get a Free Offer in a Pandemic? was an experiment in how effective a new strategy would be in making Croatia a better place. Big Data versus the Mighty State of Uhljebistan.

Results were encouraging, and then Index.hr published THIS. And suddenly my little experiment became a national discussion.

I wanted to give you a little update, for while we can all laugh (a tragic laugh) at the indifference and ineptitude, there are some very positive things that have come out of this.

1. Some excellent submissions – you can see the ones we have done already (and the ones we will do when I get some time – next one today hopefully) here https://www.total-croatia-news.com/tag/virtual-croatia

2. Some tourist boards are coming together. One tourist board on Brac sent me the materials and after a discussion, we agreed to do one big one for the whole island. All Brac tourist boards have now sent me the info. A similar story for inland Dalmatia.

3. One tourist board director actually picked up the phone and called me to thank me for the initiative, but his new video would only be ready in a week. And a great video it is too – you will see it on Virtual Croatia shortly.

I had several angry emails, from tourist board directors who claimed that they had never received the email, even after checking SPAM.

As I said in my article, 16 emails did not arrive due to SPAM filters, full mailboxes and disabled accounts. There has been a lot of interest in this, as people want to know how their local tourist board reacted.

I believe in transparency, it is our best weapon against the Mighty State of Uhljebistan. And I would be happy to make all the data publicly available to help the discussion along. I am not sure what the GDPR etc issues are on that, but if anyone with some knowledge on this could send me an email to [email protected] Subject GDPR, that would be helpful.

And the data is golden. In the lead photo, for example, meet the local tourist board who opened the offer on April 30 and unsubcribed. Then suddenly became interested after the Index article.