How can the travel industry responsibly market a destination?

The global travel industry is becoming increasingly focused on promoting sustainable and responsible tourism – and so it should be!

It’s the best way to ensure that the incredible destinations travellers love can stay with us for generations. However, over-tourism and unsustainable practices can (and have) lead to environmental damage, fractured local communities and overall lacklustre travel experiences for visitors venturing to the destination they’ve been dreaming of.

We only need to look at destinations like Uluru in July 2019, or what the cruise industry has done to Venice (pre-pandemic) to understand how over-tourism can impact a destination.

So, with sustainability at the forefront of travel experiences, we’re here to ask how those in the industry can responsibly market destinations?

The key to responsible and sustainable tourism lies in modern marketing. Utilising valuable data sets at hand to attract not only the right number of visitors for your region, but the highest-yielding clientele is the first major step all destination marketers should be making. And with this step, those in the travel industry can responsibly market destinations that are prone to over-tourism, or susceptible to the troubles of unsustainable travel.

An Aussie company that specialises in ensuring travel marketing is done with responsible tourism and sustainability in mind is Audience360 – a leading provider of 1st party audience data with transparent data from trusted brands around Australia.

Audience360 helps those in the travel industry effectively market their offering through activating high-quality data. Audience360’sdata partnership with Webjet.com.au, Australia’s #1 online travel agency, means that it reaches over 2.8 million per month who are searching and booking flights, accommodations, car rentals, and other travel services online.

Audience360’s data set helps destinations manage visitation at a suitable level throughout the year, both the peaks and troughs. By using verified deterministic data destination marketers can evolve from traditional marketing practices and align the right data set with the best technology to not only attract visitors to the region, but to attract visitors who will deliver maximum economic benefit, whilst protecting their region from over-tourism and maintaining the community lifestyle enjoyed by locals.

Additionally, using deterministic data to personalise a destination’s offering also increases dispersal across the entire region – which in itself ensures a more sustainable tourism industry. Where a destination may be promoted as a fly-and-flop beach location that is often overcrowded, there is often a variety of additional activities such as fine dining, wineries and breweries, cultural sites, and adventure activities that go under-promoted. Leaning into the interests of the traveller, because you have the right data set to identify them, allows for economic sustainability by encouraging dispersal.

This targeting means you avoid the homogenisation of a region and opens up a variety of travel vendors who cater towards a multitude of trip-types – strengthening the breadth of the travel industry for your destination.

In enabling these data strategies, Audience360 works with locals so they can sustain long term tourism, by promoting the diversity of a destination. This avoids negatively impactinglocal communities, environmental sustainability and longevity as a holiday spot.

Audience360 helps those in the industry reach their target audience to drive sustainable outcomes by leveraging exclusive first party data and its custom analytics platform. Timing your marketing to ensure sustainable, ethical and responsible tourism can be much easier with the right dataset and that’s what Audience360 helps the travel industry with.

To find out more about Audience360 and how it can help your business promote responsible tourism click HERE.

Featured Image: iStock/kieferpix

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Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

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