The money is in shoulder season.
Peak weeks sell out without you. Your job is the eight weeks on either side.
· 7 min read
Destination budgets usually peak alongside visitation, which is exactly backwards. Marginal spend against a sold-out week moves nothing except the rate a hotel could have charged anyway.
Move the money into the shoulder weeks and spend it on itineraries with real numbers in them: three days, actual prices, actual drive times. Vague inspiration content loses to a page that answers what a weekend costs.
Bring the operators with the most empty inventory into the campaign and let them co-fund it. They have the strongest incentive and the best offers, and a shoulder-season package with a real discount from a real hotel outperforms anything a bureau writes alone.
Segment by trip cost and travel distance, not by age. A Miami drive-market visitor from Naples and a long-haul visitor from Frankfurt are booking two different trips and only one of them cares about your flight-deal messaging.
More on this market: Small business marketing in Miami
The short version
- Stop buying media against sold-out weeks.
- Publish itineraries with real prices and real distances.
- Segment by trip cost and distance.
- Co-fund with the operators who have the most to lose.
Sources and further reading
- Travel forecasts and monthly travel data, U.S. Travel Association
- Miami visitor industry research and statistics, Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau
Want our two cents on your business?
Tell us what you're working on. We'll tell you what we'd do.
Let's talk