HOMAS MacDonald may be a civil servant, but he adopts the approach of a private businessman when it comes to spending taxpayers' money on promoting Bermuda as a destination to potential visitors from the UK.

Fully aware that success in his role as the UK and Europe regional sales manager for Bermuda Tourism will be measured in numbers ? how many visitors, how long they stay and how much they spend ? Mr. MacDonald focuses on extracting the maximum value out of each marketing dollar.

"We run it as a business," Mr. MacDonald said this week. "We no longer just write out cheques to people to promote Bermuda.

"Now we look for tour operators that we believe have a propensity for selling Bermuda in a serious way and we say, 'I'll give you number of marketing dollars if you deliver number of visitors'. It's a 'pay for performance' system. There may be 30 tour operators marketing Bermuda through travel agencies and sending out brochures to their mailing lists. But we only contract with those we feel are able to deliver several hundred visitors and that may be just half a dozen of them."

Mr. MacDonald said he had witnessed the change to a more results-based approach and its subsequent development over the past four or five years working for the Ministry.

Before he went to set up the London office a year ago, he saw the changes come in as head of the New England region office in Boston. Before that, he worked for three years in Chicago, when Tourism had a base there.

Mr. MacDonald was asked a year ago to set up an office in London when the Ministry dropped its previous marketing agents Hills Balfour to bring the operation in house. The office, situated in Borough Street, near Tower Bridge, opened last October.

"The model we use is the one we have been using on the North American side," Mr. MacDonald said. "It was felt that Hills Balfour was not doing all they could in the way they were selling Bermuda and that is why we were asked to come over.

"What we are doing now is being more proactive, going out to associations and societies, groups of doctors, lawyers or tennis players ? anybody we feel may be interested in coming to Bermuda."

While Hills Balfour promoted the island with a team of six people, Mr. MacDonald is one of a team of three. His helpers are business development manager Christopher Joell-DeShields and sales representative Neitra Dill.

Like Mr. MacDonald, both of his colleagues are Bermudian, a fact that enables them to come up with quick answers to potential tourists' detailed queries on matters such as the distance of the nearest supermarket to a certain hotel or the quirks of Bermuda custom.

Ms Dill is in her 20s and previously worked for Hills Balfour. Mr. MacDonald hired her after the Ministry terminated the British agency's contract.

Mr. Joell-DeShields has lived in Britain for 12 years, having gone to college there and stayed to work in the hospitality industry.

"He's very busy, because he's the one who goes out after contracts are signed to make sure the tour operators are doing what they said they were going to do," Mr. MacDonald said.

"He also goes out to the trade shows and speaks to groups. He knows a lot of people in the hospitality industry and is a great asset to us."

BA's interest in promoting Bermuda as a destination has been revitalised by the arrival of the daily flight from London's Gatwick Airport.

The airline has made a collaborative effort with Mr. MacDonald's office to market the island in full-page adverts in a number of magazines that are read by those fitting Bermuda's target tourist profile, such as the monthly magazine, and . There have also been strip ads in the travel sections of some UK newspapers.

Internet advertising has made up a part of the campaign, with rotating banner ads on sites like that of Sunday newspaper and magazine, linking to BA's own web site, ba.com, where there are links to local hotels.

More than 30 billboards have also been pasted up in the London area, mostly at railway stations in the suburbs where many of the city's wealthier inhabitants start their daily commute.

The campaign urges Britons to "take a closer look at Bermuda".

Marie Hilditch, the director of sales at BA's New York office, said the airline was promoting the daily flight at both the London and the Bermuda end.

"Part of our recent commitment to promoting the flight was our recent seat sale in Bermuda, which was a tremendous success," Ms Hilditch said. "We had more than 2,000 extra bookings as a result of it.

"We are very pleased with that. But now that we have all this extra capacity, we will continue to work hard to fill it."

Although most of those seat sale passengers had flown only as far as London, others ventured farther, with Barcelona, Dublin and Geneva the next most popular destinations. The fact that Gatwick is "the gateway to the rest of Europe" is a point that BA wants to stress to the local market.

A seat sale for passengers coming out of London has also illustrated that Bermuda is an attractive destination to Britons, if the price is right.

"We promoted destinations all around the world from the UK and Bermuda was one of the top performers ? it was in the top five sellers," Ms Hilditch said.

The closure of the BA office on Front Street last December has meant the airline has had to sell tickets by different means. But that has not been a problem thanks to good support from travel agents and the readiness of customers to book online.

MacDonald's responsibilities extend to continental Europe and he has hired people to market the island in Milan and Munich, as Italy and Germany are the two best European markets for Bermuda outside Britain.

And he is also involved in representing Bermuda at major travel fairs in London, Berlin and Barcelona, where the island is competing against the rest of the world.

For several reasons, Mr. MacDonald expects Bermuda to become an increasingly popular destination for Europeans.

"We are getting a new direct flight out of Munich in June and that will be the start of it all," he said. "The demand has always been there.

"The impetus to market Bermuda has been there in the US for a long time, but not in the UK. Now everybody understands the value of the European customer, who can afford to stay longer and spend more.

"For many of them, Bermuda is a refreshing new product. Many Indian Ocean destinations are still recovering from being badly hit by the tsunami and we can fill the gap."

Mr. MacDonald's experiences on either side of the Atlantic have taught him the basic differences between the typical British and American tourist.

"One thing we are keen to exploit is that the Europeans have more vacation time to spare," he said. "While an American worker may start a job with two weeks' annual vacation, a British worker will get three weeks or a month straight away.

"So the Briton is likely to spend more time on a Bermuda vacation. Even if they both wanted to spend the same proportion of their vacation time ? say a third of it ? then the American might spend five days in Bermuda while the Briton could spend two weeks."

European visitors also tend to find the island more affordable than Americans, because of the weakness of the dollar against the euro and the pound, and so they tend to spend more.

"When they come to Bermuda, they also go a little more in depth than the Americans," Mr. MacDonald added.

"They will go out and meet the local people and really get into the marrow of the destination.

"They don't sit around the pool for three days and go home and say they've been to Bermuda. They will go out and visit places and see things. That is what the Bermuda experience is about.

"If you sit on the beach under a palm tree for the whole vacation, then you could go home thinking Bermuda is just like any other island. Bermuda isn't like anywhere else and European visitors will try to get under its skin."