Leisure hotel bookings are slowly rebounding, as is the drive market, which indicates that more people are traveling locally. As travelers begin to return to destinations, they are picking places in their backyard.
This trend creates new opportunities for Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs) to grow accountability within their community.
For destination marketers, it’s critical to understand how to navigate this new world, where fewer people will be flying. DMOs must embrace wider accountability for their own place in their regional market and start measuring it based on long term health indicators that will lead to stronger community ecosystems.
Resident relationships
Benchmarking year-on-year growth is going to only show the macro picture (often worse right now). Destinations should segment growth in rings, local, two-hour drive, five-hour drive, or fly.
This will help them see exactly what kind of new traveler base they are dealing with, and where there are marketing opportunities to entice visitors from local or drive markets. For example, it’s possible that people from a nearby city are visiting, but local residents aren’t.
The effect on the larger community is also important. It’s more than filling hotel beds. Local restaurants, shops and other businesses are also important elements that keep the ecosystem around a destination attractive for visitors in the coming months and years.
It’s a good idea to create strong regular communication with these businesses and determine how everyone can work together to build a strong and supportive community that attracts travelers and keeps them safe.
Balancing resident sentiment and travel demand will be especially valuable as the economy takes steps to reopen or close again as the pandemic evolves. Understanding barriers and drivers for residents can inform reopening and community plans to welcome back guests.
DMOs should measure resident sentiment; how it tracks over time and in response to changes in the market or DMO initiatives, they must focus on current barriers for residents and businesses as it pertains to travel.
Discover new data streams
Now is the time to spend time investigating data that you may never even have known existed and work out how it can be used successfully for your destination. Identify new goals and create a holistic vision to better determine what data sources will help track success.
For example, geolocation data such as heat maps can help destinations to understand people’s movements and where they congregate. Some destinations are even leveraging CO2 and water or electricity consumption to analyse traveller behavior.
This can be incredibly useful in a place, for example, like a theme park, where it is important to limit overcrowding, or in areas where there is a goal to nudge behaviours towards new areas of a city, such as New York’s Hudson Yards.
In the current pandemic, it’s even more critical to understand how to ensure we aren’t pushing people to one area of a small city or town. This can inform resident and visitor promotion and program development to focus on what is attracting people today.
Understanding real-time intent is also crucial; leveraging sources like search data and airline capacity, as well as working with data providers who marry deterministic with probabilistic data to understand customer intent can help forecast for recovery and to capture market share through driving interest in critical booking periods.
Sustainable place management
A more holistic understanding of the value of the entire community as a destination can be gained by evaluating visitor spend - visits to restaurants, gas stations, retail shops, and leisure attractions generate huge revenue and are a key source of value for local businesses and residents.
Communities will have felt the pain of a drop in tourism far beyond the ticket sales and hotel occupancy rates, and we must reflect that in how we interpret revenue gains through a more community minded tourism approach.
Measuring the overall positive impact of more local and regional travelers is also a huge boon towards proving value to the community and encouraging a positive attitude towards travel.
We need to consider "place management" rather than "destination marketing." This means accountability for responding to resident and business concerns, building community relationships; while leveraging data to ensure maximum market capture with maximum benefit to the location.
And not only this, but also on how we embrace sustainability goals and promote circular economies in the sector in order to build a true community understanding and to assess current data sources and uses, replacing with immediacy where a metric falls short. We are at a new beginning in travel; our measurement of success can, therefore, start afresh, too.
Accountability ties a community to the commitment of a result.