Tracking the success of your sales, marketing and promotional efforts is not easy. We asked a number of DMO professionals around the country for their evaluation strategies.
“We track based on room-night goals each year. We rely on our hotel partners sharing their leisure group room-nights with us each month. We try hard to keep a great database of the group sales person at each hotel, and monthly, they provide us their room nights that were leisure group rooms.”
–Roger Dudley, Experience Columbus
“I use a variety of methods, everything from Tour Tracker Pro, TAP’s Travel Metrics, Welcome Center stops and tracking retail tour offerings from year-to-year. Another important component is building trust with your industry partners so that they are happy to supply you with their client booking information.”
–Rich Gilbert, Maryland Office of Tourism
“Our success is tracked through group bookings at our hotels. One of our primary functions is to connect tour operators with the best properties for their groups, and we do that by sending out leads to targeted hotels. Once the group books with one of them, we count those room-nights.”
–Mindy Shea, Visit Savannah
“Rapid City Convention and Visitors Bureau continues to seek new and improved tracking methods to measure our sales success. As technology and the travel industry evolve, evaluating the number of hotel leads distributed and the number of groups serviced remain solid attributes to our sales efforts.”
–Julie Jones-Whitcher, Rapid City Convention & Visitors Bureau
“We track our group business a couple of different ways. We send a monthly form to our partners (attractions, hotels, a few restaurants) through Simpleview asking for motorcoach business. We ask for company, state and number of passengers. We have some really good partners. We don’t take credit for all of the business; we just ask them to help us so we can do follow-up, appointment requests, etc.
“We also offer a ‘bus box’ to groups. We leave a pop-up cooler or a cooler on wheels at the hotel for the escort to pick up on arrival. The cooler has about $100 worth of promotional items to be used as prizes if they play games on the coach. If we know how many people are traveling with them, there is enough of one item to be handed out to the entire group.”
–Sandy Price, Oklahoma City Convention & Visitors Bureau
