Business Matters: Marketing Travel in 2020

So far, it’s not looking very good. In a word, Coronavirus. Businesses don’t have the opportunity to sit around for 3-6 months, let alone 3-6 days of non-activity. Travel and travel-related businesses have been hit the worst.

Business Matters: Marketing Travel in 2020

Let’s be fair for just a moment. Coronavirus is serious, and governments globally are doing the right thing of shutting borders, placing people in quarantine. But what about the economic implications? Okay, Marketing Minds, shower us with solutions!

Old fashioned home-grown marketing

Marketers who depend on international traffic are going to have trouble, so it’s time to turn back the clocks and focus on the local market. For decades, these marketers have been able to rely on ongoing vacationers to fill the money box, but with the airlines empty, what can hotels, and tourist hot-spots do to stay afloat?

It’s time to bring that marketing back at home.

Marketing to your local area is not as hard as it seems. It’s about instilling pride in your locale and why the residents should be proud.

Example time

The Louvre in Paris is the world’s most famous museum. It’s no secret that French locales are proud to host such a luxurious tourist attraction but how many locals visited there over the past year?

Without international tourists, how can we reignite the passion and the spark from these local travelers?

How can we tap into the economic cautious mind of the locals and bring out the pride of the country and its native offerings?

How do we run marketing?

Using scare tactics tends to be partially helpful, though, sometimes it tends to make people worried about other stuff too (negative effects!).

The successful route is the “rediscovery” approach.

Using the Louvre example, using tag lines as “French Pride!”, “See France again for the first time!”, phrases that stir up emotion and connection to the native homeland of the locals.

Will this prove to be as much revenue as normal? Probably not, and it’s certainly not sustainable. In the short term, however, these solutions have the potential to save 100s if not 1000s of businesses around the world as we fight the global outbreak.

Is it really this bad?

We didn’t think so, but after weeks of conference cancellations, corporate travel restrictions and nose-diving stock values, hotel owners are feeling the burn the most.

Ryman Hospitality Properties Inc. — which owns large conference hotels as well as the famous country music showcase Grand Ole Opry — pulled its forecast for 2020 under the pressure of cancelations that make past hits to the lodging niche look minor. Pebblebrook Hotel Trust jumped on the cancelation train on Monday, March 9, saying that growing cancelations from groups and business travelers have made it almost impossible that the company will achieve its first-quarter and full-year projections.

“I’m very surprised at this point that others have not,” said Patrick Scholes, an analyst at Suntrust Robinson Humphrey Inc. “Historically, this has been an industry that has been highly reluctant to take down their numbers or talk negatively about trends unless their feet have been held to the fire and it’s painfully obvious they have no choice.”

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Starting when Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. reported earnings on February 11, hotel companies described the coronavirus as a minor drag on earnings, focusing mainly on travel in and out of China.

“We would expect this will be messy for the next few weeks, if not maybe the next few months,” Marriott International Inc. Chief Executive Officer Arne Sorenson said on a February 27 earnings call. He added that when the outbreak ends, consumers will regain confidence and “travel will come back and it will probably come back fairly quickly.”

Article Submitted by Kas Andz | www.kasandz.com | KAMG Digital Marketing Solutions

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