With local tourism still reeling from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, the Virgin Islands Department of Tourism is turning to non-traditional marketing platforms to maximize massively reduced advertising dollars.
“We’ve been able to garner a lot out of social media, which is much more cost-effective,” Tourism Commissioner Beverly Nicholson-Doty said. “In many cases, we were transitioning to social media and targeted media platforms as opposed to television and print magazines because those are extremely expensive.”
The Tourism Department receives advertising funding directly from hotel occupancy taxes. After the hurricanes, those revenues took a steep dive – down to $1.25 million in April 2018 from $3.19 million in the same month last year. According to Doty, only 50 percent of traditional hotel units are currently available, with more than 1,000 rooms lost in the aftermath of the storms.
Now facing an overall budget decline of 60 percent, the department is delving deeper into the use of targeted social media campaigns.
“We are looking at individuals’ behavioral patterns in the arena of travel,” she said. “If they’re tracking warm weather vacation, we can serve up ads directly to individuals, so it’s more targeted instead of having the shotgun approach of traditional television and print advertising.”
Social media also gives them a cleaner read on user response, said Doty, tracking views, clicks and conversions – airline bookings or hotel reservations resulting directly from clicking on a V.I. Tourism ad. In comparison, with television and print, they gauge advertising value based only on the outlet’s circulation or viewership.
The department also ramped up its public relations effort, reaching out to news outlets in the mainland and around the world to spread the word about the tourism industry’s recovery.
“We’ve had lots and lots of media that have been down to the Virgin Islands since the storm,” said Doty. “And that’s an extremely credible form of marketing because it’s third-party. It’s the journalists’ view of the territory.”
In addition, Doty said she has been on television, on the radio or on the phone talking to journalists to promote the territory, resulting in the Virgin Islands being featured in 348 individual news articles and stories in national and international media since the storms. The amount of coverage would have cost the territory $11 million in advertising dollars, she said.
“Public relations value is a multiplier of three,” added Doty. “If you take that into account that at least three people will see the story or coverage, it’s covered that many more times by public relations, that’s worth $33 million dollars.”
Doty said they have also taken advantage of conferences and trade shows frequented by consumers or travel professionals, including trade shows by the New York Times and the Boston Globe.
Tourism has not completely abandoned print media advertising. Doty said they continue to advertise in bridal magazines after seeing “a fair amount of brides” still coming down to the territory for honeymoons or destination weddings in spite of damage from the hurricanes.
Shifting Trends
While their shift in advertising strategy is more cost-effective, Doty admits that this year poses challenges in terms of their ability to measure conversion from different platforms. Normally, she said, they can look at their budget, marketing strategy, as well as data from airlines and hotels, and determine how many visitors came because of a particular promotion or a bridal marketing initiative.
“I will be honest, this year, it is definitely more splintered,” she said.
The sharing economy – the use of villas or AirBnB – is the new norm, Doty said, and contributes to more fragmented tourism data. Tourism is seeing more AirBnB units available after the storms, but while AirBnB has been collecting taxes for the Virgin Islands since May 2017, their tax information is lumped in with traditional hotels and villas.
“We are looking, along with the Bureau of Economic Research, of other ways to quantify the visitors that are staying in non-traditional hotels … what they’re doing in the territory and how many of them,” Doty said.
While they anticipate the reopening of major hotels in 2019 and 2020, the trends have already been shifting toward millennials and savvy travelers who are comfortable staying in non-traditional accommodations or sharing , according to Doty. The storms only exacerbated this phenomenon in the Virgin Islands, she said.
In spite of slow progress in getting hotels back online, the Tourism Department is “cautiously optimistic” that they will reopen on schedule, which comes with a silver lining, according to Doty.
“One of the things that we’re very positive about is that as hotels reopen, they will be fully renovated, and it would certainly bode well for us in the marketplace to have a fresh and new product,” Doty said.
Every year that she has been at the helm our numbers have declined.
Hopefully this is her last year.
Many visitors book through VRBO or other sites that do not collect taxes and therefore the numbers are harder to track.
The VI is losing cruise ship visitors, because other ports have become more competitive or have partnered with the cruise lines. Hopefully St Croix will be able to bring small ships to Christiansted soon.