Outbound Projects and Tourism Manager for Value Retail, James Crosby, met with P&O representatives as part of a whistle-stop tour of Dover and Thanet last Tuesday and Wednesday.
Mr Crosby said one purpose of his visit was to scope out marketing opportunities for the nine European Chic Outlet Shopping centres run by his firm.
As part of that promotion talks have taken place to discuss how P&O and Value Retail could link up to let passengers know about the outlets in London, Paris, Milan, Dublin, Madrid, Frankfurt, Barcelona, Brussels and Munich.
He said: "I have been looking around Dover and the opening markets with the cruise and ferry industries. I am sure there are links we can create here. In tourism there is room for developments such as with P&O.
"We have also, provisionally, been talking about the Open Golf event and marketing there but at the moment I am just on a fact finding mission."
P&O spokesman Chris Laming said: "This company is very enterprising and has a very clever business model which seeks to attract inbound tourism to their locations in the UK and Europe.
"They actively form partnerships with tour operators and travel companies and they have approached P&O because they believe we could work in partnership to provide traffic inbound to the Bicester outlet near Oxford and La Vallee Village which is close to Disneyland Paris. A lot of the Disney visitors go by P&O Ferries and we already have special ticket deals with Disney so maybe we can offer something for those customers to then go next door to the village.
"There are also villages in the Antwerp and Cologne area that could appeal to customers on our northern sea operation from Hull to Zeebrugge and Rotterdam.
"We like to give our customers reasons to use our ferries and if it benefits P&O it benefits our employees, the majority of whom live in Dover."
Mr Crosby has also spoken to chiefs at Kent International Airport in Manston about promoting the shopping outlet in Kildare if plans for Flybe to run flights to Dublin come to fruition.
The European shopping villages, which boasted more than 25 million shoppers in 2009, have around 130 boutiques each, selling high end fashion such as Gucci at discount prices.
Dover District Chamber of Commerce chief executive David Foley, who was instrumental in introducing Mr Crosby to P&O bosses, is also hoping to look at the outlet model to see how it could apply to Dover and east Kent.
He said: "They have the highest retail outlet sales in the world. We want to look at that and how they attract customers and how we can take a step forward for the retail sector in Dover."
SOURCE: this is Kent by Kathy Bailes
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