NYC & Company is on a mission is to boost travel and tourism opportunities for New York City around the world. As the official Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) and Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB) for the five boroughs of New York City, NYC & Company wanted to target travelers showing an interest in visiting their city. This had proved tricky in the past.
Prior to 2020, NYC & Company had used historical booking data and survey results taken from travelers in the departure lounge at the airport to inform their campaigns.
Reacting in real-time
The NYC & Company Research team, including Jonathan Tesser, VP Research, Insights and Analytics, was concerned about how broad their national marketing campaigns were. The team wanted to run marketing campaigns based on two broad methods of targeting:
1. Traveler personas
Using real-time data to understand their booking habits and identifying a similar set of traits (e.g. age, gender, socio-economic group) in the customers.
2. Geographic trends
Using predictive and real-time data to identify if geographic areas have become more disposed to traveling to New York City. For a variety of reasons, New York City can become a destination of choice that would not be obvious from analyzing historic data, such as currency fluctuations, sporting events relevant to an overseas region, changes to routes by carriers flying in, or an economic upturn in a traveler’s region that makes trips more accessible.
This approach means marketing spend is dedicated to either where current demand is rising, or demand generation is needed. Additionally, instead of having a static marketing plan, you can be more proactive — by aligning actions and decisions to real-time and predictive traveler patterns and behaviors.
“After viewing the Travelport data solution I realized — this product would give me the power of knowing what’s currently going on using actual data from today to spot the trends for tomorrow.”
Building data-led marketing campaigns
To do this, NYC & Company was looking for a data solutions product that met their five-tier pyramid for data analysis.
Most products that access GDS data can fulfill stages 1 – 3. Some do stage 4, but NYC & Company was unable to find one that followed through with all five stages Until NYC & Company spoke to Travelport. “Others can provide raw data, but this then required some legwork to get it to a structured format that allowed proper analysis to provide real insights. With some consultation and collaboration, the Travelport solution did this legwork for us.” Following some conversations, it became obvious that Travelport could provide what NYC & Company was looking for. According to Jonathan, “Only Travelport provide the data in a format that can be used to then make forward-looking projections about traveler preferences and trends.”
Getting ready for recovery
As borders and economies around the world gradually reopen, the travel industry will also begin to recover. NYC & Company wanted to position themselves to be ready to capitalize on emerging travel trends.
“At the moment Travelport is the only company that understands the problem we are trying to solve. It gave us a unique solution, meaning it is very much tailored to what NYC & Company required. And the Travelport team has worked with us continually to provide ongoing and innovative solutions as we came up with new ideas and perspectives. For this solution to work we really needed a collaborative relationship, and that is what Travelport has provided. This is not an off-the-shelf data set, it’s an engagement process, and a real working relationship.”
