 |
Alliance Shares New Plan for Drawing TouristsSaturday, November 20, 2010 The Greater Williamsburg Chamber and Tourism Alliance is working on getting tourists to visit the Triangle in off-season months, according to a presentation made to York County supervisors this week. York County gave a little over $360,000 to the Alliance during this fiscal year. To get an update on how things are going, York County Supervisors invited Alliance President Dick Schreiber to their Tuesday meeting, where he outlined some Alliance activities and marketing strategy and details on their recently released lodging report. Schreiber said the Alliance’s newest marketing strategy aims to boost visitation at three off-season times, which are spring, September, and December. He talked about his organization’s sports marketing, too, and shared results of a recent lodging report showing the growing gap between timeshares and hotels.The Alliance estimates that the other entities marketing tourism (including Colonial Williamsburg, Busch Gardens, the Williamsburg Area Destination Marketing Committee, Premium Outlets, Jamestown and Yorktown) spend about $40 million to $50 million each year on marketing the destination. The Alliance’s marketing budget is “small potatoes” compared to that, so Schreiber says the organization wants to complement, not replicate, the other groups’ strategies. They plan to do this through their new “special emphasis programs” in order to broaden the appeal of the area to beyond peak summer months. Schreiber showed supervisors a graph with data on general patterns of attendance based on data supplied by Colonial Williamsburg and Busch Garden, which showed large dips in attendance in early spring months, and also in September and December. On top of their typical activities to promote tourism, the Alliance wants to improve numbers during these lower-visitation periods. Schreiber said one of the big positive outcomes to increasing tourism in the off season would be to help employment in the area – “[summer] seasonal employment here is very problematic,” he said. More steady visitors would mean more jobs. To beef up Christmas visits, the Alliance has spent $140,000 in an advertising campaign that just started in the Washington, D.C. market because people in that area are close enough to come for just a few days. They are promoting their ChristmasInWilliamsburg.com website with the advertising, sending people to a site where they can get information on various holiday programs. The Alliance staff will also visit various travel offices in the region, go on sales missions, have a holiday display at welcome centers and more to attract tourists. They plan to do a similar campaign in September to promote the arts and again in spring to highlight the gardens of the area. These new marketing promotions will be good for the lodging business as well as for dining and retail businesses, Schreiber told the board. “We need to build up the fringes [around summer], level out, so our risks are offset,” he said. The Alliance will also be working on pushing sports marketing through a newly-formed committee and its new website, SportsWilliamsburg.com. The group has set aside about $75,000 for this use, and has established a six-member group to administer funds. They’re working on a proposal currently that could equal up to 62,000 room nights, Schreiber said, but he didn’t elaborate on the plan. The Alliance is also in charge of organizing the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. All these new marketing plans stem from the organization “trying to look at the market and see how we can add to it,” Schreiber says. He also briefly reviewed the Alliance’s recently released lodging report for the Triangle (read a detailed story on the report’s findings here). The report looks at trends in lodging from 1987 to the present using available hotel room data and extrapolated timeshare overnight occupancy numbers based on anecdotal evidence. Demand in that period of time has gone up by about 50 percent, while supply has gone up by over 60 percent, Schreiber told supervisors, and trends between hotels and timeshares are very different. Hotels have been steadily losing occupancy and revenue, while timeshares have been seeing occupancy of about 75 percent on average. Schreiber thinks businesses in the Triangle should make contact with timeshares and get their information out to timeshare visitors, who generally stay in the area for longer periods of time compared to hotel visitors. This means they will be eating more and shopping more in the area, and can go to secondary attractions, he said. “[The data] doesn’t solve the problems for hotels,” said Schreiber. “Hotels are suffering greatly,” and for those without recognizable brands or more modern facilities “it’s difficult for them to have funds to reinvest in their business.” Supervisors seemed interested in the lodging report. Supervisor Sheila Noll said clearly timeshares had been successful with the Triangle’s goal to get people to stay “just one more night.” Chairman Donald Wiggins said the information Schreiber shared was interesting, and he would be sure to invite him to speak to the board more often.
|
|
Copyright © 2010-2011 WY Daily. Davis Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Website by Web-tactics
Website by Web-tactics
Comments
A great idea is to use the champion of corporate communication - email. Imagine the power of leveraging all the emails leaving the Alliance's network and affiliates with advertisements, promotions and links to planned event info.
As a fairly avid history buff, I expected to be fairly heavily vested in the Jamestown 400 celebration. But the way it turned out, the thing pretty much sailed past me in the night.
The only two lasting impressions I have of it --
1. the haggling over the regional information center,
and
2. trying to figure out what I could to to avoid the traffic at their weekend festival, the traffic that never materialized.
For me that whole process was a missed opportunity.