Tenerife Magazine’s round up of some of the most interesting news stories of the week in Tenerife.
Thomson Holiday’s New TV Promotion Features Tenerife
Tour operator Thomson are breaking with an age old tradition of flooding TV advertising spots on Boxing Day in the UK with images of long sandy beaches and warm sunshine. Instead they started their campaign early with two new adverts screened at peak TV time during The X Factor. The new adverts feature a young boy extolling the importance and magic of family holidays.
The adverts, filmed on Tenerife, focus on the family rather than the location whose half-glimpsed sandy beaches and infinity swimming pools are seen in the background.
The eagle-eyed amongst you out there may spot that the location Thomson used is Tenerife but the advert doesn’t mention this so you have to know it’s Tenerife to know it’s Tenerife…if you see what I mean.
We thought we could identify five different locations from the TV advert…but it wasn’t easy.
However, if you’ve seen the ad and are trying to figure out “Where on Tenerife’ it was filmed, this ‘Behind the Scenes” version should help identify a few of the locations used.
El Hierro Eruption Update
Although El Hierro remains on yellow alert and the area around La Restinga on red alert, seismic activity has decreased over the last few days with the eruptive process remaining stable over the last week.
Scientists believe this may be as a result of a second undersea eruption near La Restinga and are currently investigating this possibility. Apart from this development, tremors have decreased in both numbers and intensity but scientists aren’t ruling out the possibility of another eruption to the north of El Hierro; although they insist this isn’t imminent.
The First Hotel in Tenerife to Launch an Iphone App
Was it the Abama, the Gran MelÃa, the Bahia de Duque or the brand new Hotel Mencey?
Actually it was none of these high profile luxury hotels, it was the Hotel Tigaiga in Puerto de la Cruz. The family run hotel has been at the forefront of using new technology and social media for some time, utilising tools like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter when others are still languishing in the dark ages in modern marketing terms.
The free app includes information about the hotel, Puerto de la Cruz and Tenerife. It’s this sort of forward thinking approach that has earned the Tigaiga award after award over the years as well as glowing plaudits from its guests. The owners of the Tigaiga deserve recognition for realising that the internet and social media isn’t the future…it’s the present.
You Never Know Who’s Watching You
The user of a laptop that was nicked from a holiday home in Tenerife must have been astounded when his stolen booty ‘shopped him’.
Thanks to a piece of software installed on the laptop, the victim’s IT savvy friend was able to remotely use the stolen laptop’s in-built camera to take a photo of the new ‘owner’ as he was using it. The image was turned over to the local police in Playa de las Américas. The result? An arrest and both laptops re-united safely with their original owner. It’s a great little tale of just rewards but it does make you think twice about wandering past the laptop in an ‘au natural’ state.
Eco Friendly Urban Gardens on Tenerife
The Tenerife Government deserve a big green round of applause for implementing a new environmentally friendly initiative called Urban Gardens. The project involves the creation of small organic community garden farms in the centre of Tenerife’s towns.
These urban gardens will be used by people of all ages and, apart from acting as a mechanism to create a stronger sense of community, the scheme is designed to educate islanders about environmentally friendly practices. There will be professional support and workshops on eco friendly and pesticide free gardening with training provided on a variety of good gardening techniques including self-composting, recycling and vermicomposting (using worms to compost).
The first municipalities to reveal a desire to go green by signing up to Urban Gardens are Tacoronte and Buenavista del Norte. Hopefully more will follow.
And finally the TIT (This Is Tenerife) of the week award goes to”¦Jet2.com
Last Month Tenerife Magazine published an article about British tour operators” descriptions of Tenerife’s resorts. We didn’t mentioned Jet2.com, but the tour operator obviously felt left out as last week they published two blogs that had us wondering if we’d time-warped back to the 1st of April.
“There are 8 Blue Flag beaches in Tenerife…” the first article informed readers, before adding. “…perhaps the most attractive is Santa Cruz de Tenerife. It’s certainly popular with UK beachgoers who flock to this part of the island in there thousands each winter.”
Santa Cruz de Tenerife beach? We must have completely missed the opening of that one. Oh, and the spelling mistake is theirs (hint), not mine.
Whilst that was just an example of poor research, the second blog was simply mind-blowing nonsense.
Titled Sun, Sea and Skiing on Tenerife, the article talked about Tenerife as a winter ski destination, suggesting that people take the cable car up Mount Teide and ski back down. It even suggested what ski wear to bring.
It looked as though the Jet2.com writer had taken their information from a hoax website about skiing in Tenerife. But tour operators of this magnitude really shouldn’t be making this sort of mistake. Somebody must have pointed out the ‘error’ to Jet2.com as the blog has now been removed from their website.
And just in case anyone’s wondering, you really can’t ski down Mount Teide (although some people do snowboard in Las Cañadas). But as for people going on the piste on Tenerife…
