The lodging sector is the cornerstone of the tourism economy.
By providing places for travelers to stay overnight, hotels and short-term vacation rentals directly impact the success of local businesses where those travelers spend their dollars. In turn, those businesses contribute to a thriving community where people want to visit, live, and work.
Most destination organizations in the U.S. are funded at least in part by lodging taxes, weaving destination promotion inextricably into the equation of community vitality.
While traditional lodging performance reports have provided a window into this key sector, there’s a vast untapped potential for destination marketers to leverage lodging data in more strategic ways.
Detailed feeder market insights, in particular, offer destination marketers new opportunities to target campaigns, optimize advertising spend, measure the effectiveness of their efforts, and maximize ROI.
Understanding where overnight visitors are coming from is critical for destination marketers and agencies seeking to make data-informed decisions about their marketing strategies.
Go into your planning cycles with a clear picture of which markets drive revenue, demand, and rate at your hotels and short-term vacation rentals.
Dig deeper to understand how average daily rate or stay value varies among feeder markets. Use these insights to focus on the visitors driving the greatest value, or differentiate your messaging between budget-conscious and luxury travelers.
Examine competitive intensity, or how important your target markets are to your competitive destinations, to gauge the cost of pursuing your ideal visitors. Or compare rate against your competitive benchmarks to accurately position yourself in the market.
Evaluate lodging feeder markets separately from destination-wide feeder markets. This lets you target the markets driving actual overnight stays, as well as the ones you’re most likely to be able to influence. The distinction is particularly important for destinations relying heavily on day-trippers or travelers staying with friends and relatives.
Analyze historical lodging data to see where you’ve moved the needle. Did your campaigns grow guest nights or revenue share in the markets you targeted? Did your investment in OTA advertising change the share of revenue driven by OTA bookings? Look at your competitive set — did you grow your market share?
Use future pacing insights to see what’s happening while ads are in flight. If your marketing aims to drive visitation during certain periods (winter holidays, a shoulder season), monitor bookings during those dates to assess whether you need to dial that campaign up or down depending on the fill rate. Keep an eye on advance purchases from your target feeder markets to see where you may need to apply a timely promotion.
After more than 20 years working in this industry, I and other tourism veterans on the Zartico team recognized that our clients needed lodging data to do more.
And so we dug in and built new lodging insights, based on booking data that comes directly from hotel GDS systems and short-term rental property management systems. Direct data reduces lag time for accessing insights and eliminates report revisions — while maintaining sample sizes robust enough to provide an accurate representation of lodging performance trends. And we provide lodging data according to your specific funding boundary, so you can focus on the patterns that affect your community.
In building these insights, we realized that this high-quality, granular data opens the door to many new data points. Metrics such as length of stay and booking window are hugely valuable for destination marketers who wish to fine-tune campaign timing and messaging. But these insights have been hard to come by with traditional reports that were neither built nor delivered with destinations in mind.
As stewards of the world’s beloved places, destination marketers’ responsibility extends beyond reporting to include influencing the future and opening pathways for the community to thrive. It’s time for visionary leaders to leave the past behind and embrace the full potential of lodging data.
These powerful insights demand a place outside of stale board reports — and outside the purview of the researchers. They belong in the thick of the marketing optimization workflow where they can inform strategic decisions and maximize ROI.
Zartico Lodging Insights provide destination marketers with reliable data to inform strategy and optimize for impact. Get in touch with our team to learn how lodging feeder markets, future pacing, and competitive benchmarking could give your destination an edge.