Hotelbeds hails success in boosting low season visitors

Destination marketing service claims average 30% increase in room nights

A B2B service for global destination marketing organisations introduced by Hotelbeds has seen stays grow by almost a third in a year.

The company is working with more than 50 tourism boards in the initiative to drive incremental tourism arrivals.

The result has been to increase room nights for target destinations by an average of up to 30%, plus improving revenue performance.

This has been achieved by attracting additional low- and shoulder-season visitors.

Partner destinations receive access to more than 60,000 B2B travel trade buyers – such as travel agents, tour operators, airlines, and points redemption clients – who together make over 1.5 billion accommodation searches per day via Hotelbeds.

Marketing and communications director Gareth Matthews said: “Our whole purpose as a travel distributor is to drive incremental high-value bookings for hotels from non-competing, hard to reach B2B travel trade sources such as retail travel agents and tour operators. So we thought why not also do the same for destinations?

“No one else is offering destination marketing boards such a comprehensive set of opportunities that allows them to easily access the distribution power of the world’s travel trade,” he claimed.

“We launched the service at a global level last year and I’m pleased to confirm that our knowledge, experience and infrastructure is already delivering, on average, increases in incoming visitor paxs [passengers] of 30% for our destination partners.”

Head of destination marketing Joseph Sheller added: “We pride ourselves on delivering highly tangible ROI for our partners and measure our success by the incremental year-over-year increase in room nights/pax produced by the campaigns, as well as the total overall economic impact.

“What destination doesn’t want incremental visitors that also stay longer and spend more, especially during the low- and shoulder-seasons?”