Planning for 2020 vacations is in full swing. As you’re planning your marketing campaigns, Key Data’s reports can help you make sure you’re targeting the appropriate markets at the right time. With real data from our partners on Kauai, Melanie Brown, our Director of Data and Analytics, walks you through how to make data-driven marketing decisions with Key Data Dashboard’s destination platform.
Step One: When do you want more people to come to your destination?
It’s popular to promote shoulder seasons - the weather is great and the crowds are smaller. But do you know when your shoulder seasons are? Here’s a look at occupancy rates on Kauai throughout 2019.
Promoting Memorial Day trips could help the area close the gap between their strong winter and summer seasons. So now we know when we want people to come, but where might those travelers come from?
Step Two: Find the right people to market to.
If we want more people to travel to Kauai at the end of May, it’s helpful to know where people are already coming from during May and June. The travel, schedules, and interests of people in those markets are likely similar to the people who are already visiting. With Key Data’s feeder market screens, we learn that many of the people who come to Kauai during May and June are from cities in California.
Step three: Find the time to get in front of those people.
So if we know when we want people from a certain market to visit, we then need to know when to get in front of them. We can look at the booking curve for visits within a week of Memorial Day 2019 to know when people planned their trips.
The booking curve shows that reservations for stays in late May 2019 really picked up around November and December of 2018. But did people from our target market of California book differently? To see, we can create a booking curve for specific feeder markets.
This shows when guests from California booked their late May stays last year. Booking activity picked up at two periods - late November and early March. The curve for Californians is a little different than the curve for all guests, so we should target them appropriately.
Wrapping Up
Here’s our (hypothetical) plan for increasing visits to Kauai based on what we saw in the data:
- Memorial Day is a big opportunity for Kauai. Drawing more people to the island during the second half of May would draw together the Winter and Summer seasons.
- Travelers from large cities in California like San Diego and San Francisco are our target audience. Many of our guests already come from those cities, and there are plenty of others to convince that Kauai is a great place to spend Memorial Day.
- Californians begin booking May trips to Kauai in late November and early March. We need to get content in front of them a few weeks prior as they start planning their vacations.
All of this data (and more) is available on our destination dashboard. Our team is also here to help you interpret what you’re seeing and make better marketing decisions. Let us know how we can help!