Wanderlust Travel Marketing Trends Report 2011

A survey of travel industry best practices

Last year, Wanderlust released the Travel Marketing Best Practices Assessment, a self-diagnostic tool that allows travel marketers to compare their strategic and tactical activity against the travel industry’s top brands. In this issue of the Wanderlust Report, we’ll report the statistical results of the assessment and comment on the implications, trends and patterns the numbers reveal about travel and tourism marketing today. We think you’ll find some of the results surprising. We did.

Most travel marketers take advantage of research

The good news is that almost 87% of destinations, resorts and attractions are using research to inform their marketing efforts. However, more than one in ten travel marketers ignore the valuable insights and benefits of qualitative and quantitative research.

The visitor database is an underutilized resource

In a past issue of the Wanderlust Report titled, “Gaining Insights from Your Customer Database,” we explored the opportunities for demographic and psychographic profiling, customer segmentation and targeted marketing to attract visitors and drive conversions. Nearly 80% of the destinations who responded are missing a huge opportunity to exploit data that they already own. The 21.5% of the respondents who are leveraging the information in their customer data are way ahead in their marketing decision making and strategy.