Blog post
June 25, 2019

The Price Of Tourism

Where Dreams Come True: Hong Kong or Shanghai?

Disneyland and Ocean Park are two major theme parks in Hong Kong. As two must-go amusement parks, price increase were announced by both parks in November and December 2015. While Disneyland increased its price by 8%, Ocean Park had an 11% increase. Different voices were heard from Hong Kong netizens and Mainland netizens on the topic.  

A downfall for Hong Kong

When Hong Kong Disneyland first announced its price increase in November 2015 it created a huge buzz across the internet, mostly commenting on related articles. Most Hong Kong netizens see Disneyland as a focus for tourists and is inconsiderate of local communities. As Shanghai Disneyland opening date approaches, both Hong Kong and Mainland netizens believe that there will be a significant downfall for Hong Kong Disneyland and the price increase would be the last opportunity for the park to perform well. As the ticket price reaches HK$539, Tokyo Disneyland, Shanghai Disneyland, and even Ocean Park become the top choices for Hong Kong netizens. It is obvious that price is netizens’ main concern and they would rather spend a little more to travel across the border for Disneyland or go to Ocean Park for free on birthdays. 

The Other Side of Hong Kong Disneyland

However, a professor at the Nicholson School of Communication, Jonathan Matusitz, supports Disneyland by pointing out that Hong Kong Disneyland has made its effort to integrate itself into the community. The Hong Kong Disneyland ticket price was initially lowered following the Asian Financial Crisis and SARS epidemic. In another words, the price increase would be baby steps to bring the price point to Disneyland’s average. In the beginning Disneyland realized that the themes were not attracting Mainland visitors because they were not familiar with the habit and culture. As an effort to please Mainland visitors, Chinese culture was added to many aspects of the park. For example, Mickey was dressed in Red Mao suit and buildings were altered to fit the belief of Feng Shui (the ancient Chinese study of arrangements).

Hong Kong or Shanghai?

On February 3, 2016, Shanghai Disneyland announced its ticket prices at RMB370 (about HK$438) on non-peak days and RMB499 (about HK$591) on peak days. In another words, Shanghai is the cheapest Disneyland in the world on non-peak days, yet more expensive than Hong Kong Disneyland on peak days. Hot debate on the Disneyland topic rises once again between Hong Kong netizens and Mainland netizens after the announcement, mostly commenting on related articles. While Mainland netizens laugh and say that “nobody will go to Hong Kong this time”, Hong Kong netizens reply by saying “Thank you shanghai, Hong Kong Disneyland is ours again”. Two different voices were observed among Hong Kong netizens with one preferring Shanghai Disneyland regardless, and another saying it’s time to support Hong Kong Disneyland. Some netizens prefer Shanghai Disneyland because Hong Kong Disneyland is way too small and boring. Interestingly, the decrease of Mainland visitors becomes the priority for those who support Hong Kong Disneyland and the heavy price seems to be forgotten.

As more details on Shanghai Disneyland is yet to come, netizens’ preference between Shanghai and Hong Kong is expected to change with every new announcement. With less than 4 months to go, it will be interesting to see what Shanghai and Hong Kong will do to attract their new target visitors.

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Australia’s vast distances from west to east coasts, typically means most visitors to the country prioritise the east coast for their travels, aspiring for the touristic photos with either the iconic Sydney Opera House, the Great Ocean Road or the Great Barrier Reef. Ironically, none of these iconic landmarks were named the number one place to visit, but Margaret River – a town in the south-west of the wildflower state took the trophy. The badge of honour was awarded as the best place to visit in the Asia-pacific for 2019 by travel authority, Lonely Planet – trumping other idyllic places in New Zealand and Singapore.

It marks the first time an Australian tourism spot has taken the top award in fifteen years and according to Tourism WA, in the year ending December 2018, Margaret River alone had 1,690,800 visitors - an increase of 8.9 per cent on the previous year.

The New Sporting Capital

This accolade brings Western Australia even more into the spotlight.

Perth has recently taken the sporting capital crown from Melbourne (the original sporting capital) after hosting impressive crowd-pleasing events including the recent 2nd game of the State of Origin which attracted 15,000 interstate visitors. Other blockbuster slate of fixtures includes the English soccer giants Manchester United and Leeds United heading to Optus Stadium next month, followed by Perth’s first Bledisloe Cup match between the Wallabies and All Blacks in August. These are all on top of the weekly AFL fixtures. Heading into summer, the Fed Cup and ATP World Cup will bring the world’s best tennis stars to Perth as well as the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup.

The McGowan government will continue to seek out these world class events with recently expressing interest to bid for Australia to host the FIFA Women’s World Cup as well as potentially steal the NRL grand final from the east coast in 2021. As interstate visitors are spending an average $1006 for every trip and international tourists splashing out $2280 each visit, these events will result in a healthy injection of tourism into the local economy and will mark 2019 as the biggest year on record in sport for WA.

Local Tourism At Its Finest

Perth, Margaret River and their surrounding cities have received some serious praise in the past months, with over 900 media mentions across broadcast, online and print in the past month alone. With the cities hosting events such as Gourmet Escape in Margaret river, Truffle Kerfuffle, Jazz by the Bay in Dunsborough, the Drop Music Festival in Busselton and the Margaret River Pro to name a few, it is easy to understand the reasons why people from all over Australia and the world are taking time out to visit. Local hoteliers and Perth based tourism providers are also taking advantage of the increased exposure to WA tourism as their businesses thrive.

Perception And Reputation

Interestingly, the reputation and perception of Perth has also been a talking point in recent months with discussions around the quality of Perth for a place to live, work, visit, study and/or invest. These conversations have been particularly apparently across online channels with 67 per cent of media mentions occurring from 1st April through to 30th June 2019. Mentions across press were a distant 2nd with 30 per cent during this period. Despite there being largely positive views of Perth held by those who live outside WA, the Committee for Perth states Perth residents are slow to recommend the city to outsiders.

If you’d like to understand the media lens on any topic, brand or audience, get in touch with us today. 

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Blog
Go Wild In Western Australia

Australia’s vast distances from west to east coasts, typically means most visitors to the country prioritise the east coast for their travels, aspiring for the touristic photos with either the iconic Sydney Opera House, the Great Ocean Road or the Great Barrier Reef.

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There is a new frontier where public perception is shaped: Large Language Models. Right now, LLMs are answering critical questions about your organisation. What are they saying? And more importantly, which sources are shaping those answers?

To navigate this landscape, public relations professionals don't need generic tools, but rather technology that speaks their language, and addresses the realities of a changed media and informational landscape.

That is why we're unveiling Lumina AI View, the latest addition to our intelligent suite of AI tools from Isentia. Trained specifically on the workflows and challenges of modern PR & communications, Lumina AI View helps you understand exactly what AI knows about you, and how it learned it.

A new standard for AI visibility

AI View tracks your citation strength and source quality alongside those of your competitors, giving you a clear view of where you hold authority and where you have gaps.

Lumina AI View maps your AI reputation from the ground up, allowing you to:

  • See which sources matter: When tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini discuss your organisation, which outlets do they cite? Track your source footprint over time and view the impact of key target media on how you’re discussed. We measure your citation strength and source quality alongside those of competitors, giving you a clear view of where you have authority and where you have gaps.
  • Gain industry-specific insight: Your competitors get cited from Financial Times and Bloomberg. You get cited on Reddit. Each brings opportunity – and risk. Discover how you measure up against industry standards, and target the sources that actually influence how AI represents you.
  • Catch narrative shifts early: AI responses change when new sources appear, sentiment shifts, or old controversies resurface. Get alerts when citation patterns change suddenly, before they impact the way you’re perceived by stakeholders.

Measure your progress: From media monitoring to full media intelligence

Lumina AI View is built on the principle that insights get stronger with repeated measurement. To help you maintain a clear view of your reputation, our proprietary scoring system provides regular updates that show you:

  • Evolving trends in how sources cite your organisation
  • Competitive standing and benchmark metrics
  • Where models differ in information presented, and sources cited 

Whether you run it weekly, on-demand, or whenever you need a check-in, patterns will emerge, trends will become clear, and you will build a baseline that makes any sudden narrative changes both comprehensible and the prerequisite to action.

Lumina AI View is part of Lumina AI, a comprehensive suite of AI tools built specifically for communicators. Our Lumina suite evolves traditional media monitoring into narrative intelligence, enabling you to truly understand how perceptions form, evolve, and impact your reputation.


Get in touch to register your interest and see what Lumina AI View can do for you.

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Blog
Introducing Lumina AI View: AI Visibility Built for PR & Comms

Lumina AI View, the latest in Isentia’s AI suite, is trained on PR & comms workflows to help you understand what AI knows about you — and how it learned it.

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Why PR and comms teams need to take LLM visibility seriously — and what to do about it

The next time a journalist, investor or potential customer wants to know about your organisation, it’s now increasingly likely they won’t Google you. They'll ask an AI.

They'll type a question into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, something like "Who are the leading renewable energy companies in Australia?" or "What's the best PR agency for healthcare in Singapore?" and the AI will give them an answer. The question is whether your own organisation shows up in that answer.

The implications are significant for communications professionals, whether they’re in the agency-side working with clients or in-house managing a brand. The rules of reputation and discovery are being rewritten, and there’s a new kind of playbook that we all need to adapt to. That’s what’s going to take us forward.

The shift no one saw coming, but perhaps should have

For decades, earned media has been the backbone of credibility. A strong piece in a respected outlet signalled trust, authority and relevance. This hasn't particularly changed, but the way that coverage gets used has.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of publicly available content - news articles, company websites, industry reports, social media, expert commentary. When someone asks an AI a question, it synthesises all of that material into a single answer. If an organisation has a strong, consistent, well-sourced presence across those channels, it is more likely to show up. If it doesn't, it becomes invisible and is absent from the conversation entirely.

Gartner's latest predictions for Chief Communications Officers underline how serious this shift is. They forecast that as LLMs increasingly replace traditional search, PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027. What they say is that this is a communications challenge, one that requires PR expertise to build trust, secure quality coverage, and maintain consistent messaging across stakeholders.

Their research also predicts that by 2029, 45% of CCOs will be using narrative intelligence technologies to monitor reputation amid rising disinformation, a recognition that the old keyword-based approach to media monitoring simply can't keep up with the way stories now form, spread and multiply. 

The AI-generated content loop and why it matters

One of the less obvious risks in this new landscape is what happens when AI starts feeding on itself.

Catherine Arrow, Executive Director of the PR Knowledge Hub, raised this point during Isentia's recent Inside the AI Shift webinar. As she explained, "AI can identify and interpret some publicly available commentary. The difficulty is that we have to be careful about what it is actually reading. You can already see this in AI overviews where the system may refer to online discussion without digging deeply enough into whether the original sources are genuine, reliable or themselves AI-generated. So we end up with AI nested inside AI, nested inside AI."

That creates a real problem for anyone in communications. If the content landscape is increasingly populated by AI-generated material which is optimised to be found by algorithms rather than to inform real people, then the signals that LLMs rely on to build their answers become less trustworthy. Human judgement, original thinking and genuine expertise become harder for these systems to find, precisely because they're being drowned out by content that was designed to game them.

Catherine puts it simply, "People can become immune to this kind of content because it does not sound like the way we speak to each other, nor does it reflect the way genuine relationships are built. Then, when conflict or outrage is layered on top, the environment becomes even harder to interpret."

For PR and comms teams, it's not enough to produce more content. The right content needs to be produced, one that is original, expert-led, and well-placed in the channels and formats that LLMs are most likely to surface.

What this means in practice

So what does it actually look like to build LLM visibility into your communications strategy? It starts with the fundamentals, but applied with new intent:

  • Expert commentary placed in credible publications. 
  • Thought leadership that's genuinely distinctive, not a rehash of what everyone else is saying. 
  • Consistent messaging across channels. 
  • Media coverage that's authoritative enough for an AI system to treat it as a reliable source.

This is where the gap between media monitoring and media intelligence becomes critical. Monitoring tells you what's been said. Intelligence tells you how stories are forming, which perspectives are shaping them, and where your organisation sits within those narratives — including how AI systems are representing you.

Dr Nici Sweaney, Founder and Director of AI Her Way, made this distinction sharply during Isentia's AI as a New Stakeholder webinar. "What will set people apart, and what AI cannot replicate is the human lens. The judgment, the relationships, the institutional knowledge, the strategic read of a room. The organisations that lean into supporting their people to harness these tools, rather than just deploying the tools, will be the ones best placed.”

That's an important framing. The answer to AI disruption is to get clear on what only humans can do and then make sure the tools we’re using actually support that.

Staying credible when the noise is deafening

There's a temptation, when faced with a challenge like this, to throw more content at the problem – more posts, more articles, more releases. But Catherine Arrow points out the risks of that approach.

"Maintaining credibility and authenticity means being yourself and not allowing AI to suffocate your identity. That will become harder to do as digital twins, synthetic voices and other tools make it easier for organisations to use it as a mask. The real challenge is not so much maintaining credibility. It is about maintaining humanity, empathy, kindness and a genuine wish to connect with others beyond the AI-intermediated space.”

That advice matters just as much for organisations as it does for individuals. Brands that let AI do their thinking, generating bland, interchangeable content at scale, will find themselves blending into the noise rather than cutting through it. The brands that show up in LLM answers will be the ones with a clear, consistent, well-evidenced point of view.

Dr Nici Sweaney reinforced this from the operational side. "Ethical use is not about not using AI. It’s about using it with intention, honesty, and a clear sense of what good looks like on the other side.”
She was also direct about the risks of rushing in, "Don’t add new shiny AI projects on top of already overloaded teams. That creates resentment, not buy-in. Start by solving the problems people already have."

The cultural dimension

There's another layer to this that often gets overlooked and that’s the cultural one.

Catherine Arrow raised important concerns about how different AI systems can distort or flatten cultural context. Many of the most widely used models are shaped by US language, commercial assumptions and social norms. Chinese models operate within a different political and cultural framework. For organisations working across the Asia-Pacific region, it directly affects how the brand, messaging and the market are understood and represented by AI.

"Different AI systems may distort cultural context by privileging dominant languages, simplifying complex meanings, mistranslating concepts, omitting local histories or reproducing the worldview of their developers and training environments. They may flatten culture by making everything sound the same.”

For communicators operating across diverse markets, this means paying close attention to where content sits, who produced it, and whether the AI systems the audiences are using can actually interpret it with the nuance it deserves.

Where Isentia's platform fits with its new toolkit for AI visibility

This is precisely the challenge that Isentia's Lumina suite was built to address. Lumina is an intelligent suite of AI tools trained on the language, workflows and realities of modern public relations and communications, designed to empower, not replace, the human element of communications strategy.

Isentia's Lumina AI View feature will allow organisations to track how their brand, competitors and key topics are described by leading LLMs, with auditable claims, citations and transparency with regards to the sources. It's the difference between wondering whether AI is getting your story right and actually being able to see for yourself. These aren't generic AI features bolted onto a monitoring tool. They're intelligence systems built for the way communicators actually work.

The bottom line

The communications landscape has shifted. AI isn't just a tool the team might use, it's a stakeholder in its own right, actively shaping how an organisation is discovered, understood and evaluated.

For PR and comms professionals, the priorities are to ensure experts, commentary and evidence are placed widely enough for LLMs to find them and include them in their answers. Intelligence is imperative and required to how narratives are forming across both traditional media and AI platforms. All of this needs to be done without losing the human credibility that makes communications worth paying attention to in the first place.

As Dr Nici Sweaney put it, "The people who get the most from AI aren’t the ones who use the most tools, they’re the ones who understand their work deeply enough to know exactly where AI can add the most leverage."

That's the opportunity. The question is whether we’re set up to take it.


To explore how Isentia's Lumina suite can help your team navigate AI visibility, get in touch or discover Lumina.

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If AI can’t find you, neither can your stakeholders

We explore why LLM visibility should be a priority for PR and comms teams — and why harnessing AI, not just deploying it, is what matters.

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Get in touch or request a demo.