Case Studies and Templates

Introducing the Visitor Cycle

Consumer behaviour has changed dramatically in the last years, fuelled by digital technologies and a mobile first world. Technology has shaped the new digital visitor and their ability to find inspiration, plan, book and share their travels before, during and after their trip. Consumers have changed and will continue to evolve according to the availability of new technologies and digital platforms in which they navigate to book their trips. In all of this, the role of the DMO has to be relevant and own each stage in the visitor journey, knowing how consumers behave along the visitor cycle and how to help them take their decisions.

Time has passed since an era in which most of the decisions related to travel were taken at physical spaces where consumers could consult travel agents and service operators, and when inspiration was created with brochures and booklets. In that era the visitor journey implied much more time than today and it was harder to understand consumers’ choices and needs. Today the preparation time for travelling itself has shortened due to the availability of inspirational content and booking tools that allow consumers to book their travel autonomously through the most innovative digital booking platforms.

Therefore we acknowledge that the visitor cycle has changed and evolved tremendously from that era. But what is exactly a visitor cycle and which phases or stages is it composed of?

Different Models Explained

Many researchers in geography, first, and in tourism and marketing after, created models and charts to depict both the physical movement in space and the behaviour of tourists before, during and after their travel. Leiper (1979) explained that tourists move from their home, point A, to a different location, point B, to go back to A when they finish their travel experience. Mill & Morrison (1985) with their model of “the tourism system” were the first to include the role of marketing and the relationship tourists have with the market. They were the first to design this model as a cycle and to represent the different elements involved. These elements are: the market, represented by tourism suppliers and competitors; marketing, the promotion and selling of services at the destination through distribution channels; the destination, where tourists go; and travel, representing flows and modes of transportation used.

After Mill & Morrison (1985), another interesting model was created by Murphy (1985), who envisaged a three-oval “pie”. The outer part represents “the destination’s (promotional) point of view”, the middle part “tourists’ point of view” and the inner part an “outdoor recreation experience model”. From this model onwards, time starts to also be encompassed in the cycle and five main temporal moments are identified: pre-travel, travel, on site experience, travel back and recollection of the experience. If we include travelling in the experience itself, the key temporal moments are three: before, during and after the travel experience.

Fast forward to the new millennium, with the inclusion of Internet and the multiple touch points increased by the emergence of online informative and booking platforms, we now have a more defined visitor cycle which encompasses new phases.

Google depicted a clearer image of today’s travellers and how they plan their travel. It is acknowledged that today’s consumers spend more time online and do extensive online research before buying. The consumer journey is increasingly starting online nowadays, at the same time connections through mobile are rising and so is the number of moments and touch points through which companies can influence the consumer buying behaviour.

Google identified 5 stages of the traveller’s journey:

1. Dreaming 2. Planning 3. Booking 4. Experiencing 5. Sharing

• The Dreaming phase is the one in which the traveller is inspired by stories and images he/she has seen somewhere online/offline or that were told by peers who already lived the experiences or other people talking about it.
• The Planning phase is the moment in which the traveller is actively looking for information about products, services and attractions in one or more destinations in view of a travel experience.
• The Booking phase is the moment in which after an active research and comparison of different prices and services, the traveller purchases tickets to travel, accommodation and other services that will compose the travel experience.
• The Experiencing phase is the actual travel to the destination and the sum of all the experiences made at the destination.
• The Sharing phase is made up of the moments in which the traveller shares the travel experiences created before, during and after the trip.

The succession of these phases can be drawn on a temporal line, as all these phases usually come one after the other in a chronological order. Nowadays, nonetheless, the Sharing phase is becoming more and more cross-temporary as it can happen simultaneously with the others.

Among these examples of visitor journey models we described, the Google model is the one getting closest to the idea of the phases crossed by consumers while planning their travel experiences today.

But how do DMOs relate to these models? Do they make their own based on their consumers of reference?

Visit San Diego is one of the DMOs that created their own visitor cycle and use it as a basis for their strategies. The DMO of San Diego identified this cycle as the Consumer Decision Journey, encompassing 6 stages:

Stage 1 is the Awareness Trigger. In this stage media is used to spark the initial awareness of the destination in the minds of consumers and starting to build interest.

Stage 2 is the Inspiration. Media and promotion are used to create an emotional stimulus that drives a desire to travel to the destination.

Stage 3 is the Consideration. Consumers are reached through advertisement and campaigns aimed at engaging them at the early stages of their research and consideration of the potential travel to the destination.

Stage 4 is the Active Evaluation. In this stage all the efforts of the DMO are put into providing the right information to drive conversion, to help consumers plan the experience and decide which services to book.

Stage 5 is the Booking/Purchase. Consumers are actively comparing prices and are being targeted in the moment they are about to purchase.

Stage 6 is the Experience/Sharing. This final stage is the actual travel experience and their subsequent sharing of the best moments collected with the consumers’ peer circle.

This model is very practical from a DMO perspective because it highlights the channels that are being used by the organisation in the different phases of the cycle and all the marketing efforts that have been carried out to influence travellers along their journey to purchase.

Adopting a Strategic Approach

Why is a strategic approach important?

The very fundamental idea of using and referring to a 'visitor cycle' is to ensure that you take the right strategic approach with every action you take as a DMO.

We always refer to the visitor cycle because it gives as a point of reference to understand how each stage of the 'decision making' journey plays out for our potential visitors, translating this then into a journey of so called 'touch-points', where we engage and interact with these visitors throughout that decision making process.

Adopting a strategic approach throughout this cycle gives us absolute clarity on what we need to do and how we need to 'engage' at every stage, ensuring there's a 'push' effect, where a potential visitor starts out relatively unaware or unconvinced to a point where he or she has the destination on that bucket list and wants to go and eventually books and shares the experience, supported by various strategic actions and triggers.

Strategic Role of Content

Content serves a key purpose in the early stages of the visitor cycle and it is important to understand how an impression of the brand is created through strong and effective content and how that is then developed further through the discovery of more in-depth and richer content.

Eventually good and effective content leads to 'travel intent', where content once again serves to support planning ideas. Content plays a role again yet further, when visitors in a destination are motivated to start sharing their experiences and even reviewing their experiences creating a powerful word-of-mouth marketing message through content sharing and endorsement through reviews and recommendations.

Strategy & Commerciality

Many DMOs retract themselves from getting involved in any commercial activities, either because they're not permitted to or they don't feel it's the right place for them to focus. There is however increasing expectation from public or semi-public organisations such as DMOs to demonstrate economic impact, results and effectiveness of their activities. So how is this achieved and measured?

Firstly, the 'earlier' stages of the visitor cycle focus on Awareness, Interest and Planning.

This work focuses heavily on content, where paid advertising can help further boost the audience reach of content, targeting it towards specific target groups and the channels they're most likely to be active on.

Measurement in these stages is multi-faceted, but largely focuses on understanding:

• Effectiveness of content through its engagement quality
• Reach of content to target markets in volume
• 'Brand recall' or 'brand lift' surveys ran after advertising

Fulfilment created by content, e.g. did users continue discovering more content and getting a deeper understanding.

Secondly, the 'middle stages' of the visitor cycle are all about 'travel intent' and 'booking'. This is where the job of content is 'done', a potential visitor is absolutely convinced, perhaps even has the destination on their bucket list, but tipping them over the line requires a convincing commercial offer, targeted at the right time with the right packaging. This is where the private sector usually act alone, but really good partnership and a truly strategic approach will see DMOs working together with transport and travel providers, to drive bookings and actively bring people to the destination.

Succeeding with this can be tricky. We hear more and more the term 'omni-channel marketing', which refers to connecting the dots between different pieces of content, campaigns, channels etc in a fragmented digital environment. The trick to successfully combining a DMOs brand and content work with, say an airline's marketing work, is to share data. This can be done with an agreement to sharing traffic data through a shared 'pixel', a piece of code identifying each user. If you can achieve this, then you can use a single Google Analytics code or a Facebook Pixel, included across both partner's digital assets, and jointly target users with a more strategic approach.

How does this work in action? If a common 'tracking code' or 'pixel' is used by two or more partners, then the DMO can invest in creating powerful content which will develop interest at the earlier stages and the commercial partners can then retarget those same users who showed interest and engaged with ads showing pricing related offers, driving bookings and representing true conversion, from early stage awareness building.

By doing this you can measure results by:

• Measuring the percentage of users ultimately booking
• The booking timeframe in specific markets
• Increase in booking volume with or without campaigns
• Effectiveness of content, by connecting booking data

The Importance of Consistency

Consistency, it's all about ensuring your brand doesn't get lost in the noise.

With more than 400 touch points in an average visitor journey online, losing track of your brand is an easy thing to do when you're frantically trying to create more and more content for more and more platforms. If you're not careful, you might fail in your mission to build a consistent relationship with potential visitors through the entire visitor journey and more critically, your potential visitors may fail to build a convincing idea of the destination.

Achieving consistency is not exclusive of many of the other aspects covered in this course. It is important to first of all have an absolutely concrete understanding of the core values, underpinning your destination's identity. The brand must be clearly defined, in terms of the key pillars and strengths underpinning it and how you adopt the right tone of voice in your content and messaging (more on that in the next chapter!).

When you're clear about your brand, you can start to ensure consistency in messaging. The key is to never lose sight of the fact that marketing a destination requires a strategic approach as explained earlier. When you start to trigger interest at what is known as 'top of funnel', at the awareness stage of the journey, you should see much further down the line that you're actually fulfilling that so called 'promise' at later stages in the funnel.

Consistency can play out in two ways...

Message

Here, you want to be sure that your messaging is spot on from the beginning point, when you engage people right through to the end. One of our favourite examples of that is Tourism Australia, where they deliver excellent campaigns aimed at triggering interest in Australia, featuring a wide range of activities and ambassadors and then on their website they truly fulfil this initial 'spark' by providing deeper more engaging content which is a direct follow-through of the same messaging.

Brand Tone

Your brand is something you should live and breathe by, doing this online through the visitor journey is trickier. It's about remaining true to those core values that form a part of your brand and continuously recall them so that the brand stays present whenever and wherever content appears. If you want to highlight the fact that pluralism and openness is a core brand value of your city for example, you'll want to ensure that content reinforces this message, whether that's 'Hero' content or deeper more engaging stories, such as with ambassadors.

If you want your city to be recognised as the home of architecture, you'll want to ensure that this is visually consistent and a running theme in everything you do so that the brand is continuously reinforced. If you want to build an image amongst something that's quite strong but perhaps not as well known or identified as it could be, you'll want to really work on making that aspect the cornerstone of your storytelling.

Sometimes, it's a simple matter of image recall - recognising the same 'icons' in powerful imagery, which over hundreds of pieces of content, actually has the effect of shaping what is an overall complete image of the destination.

A great example for this is the case of Visit Copenhagen and Norwegian. (watch below)

Omni-Channel Conversion Funnel

The standard marketing funnel is a sort of journey as well, the journey of the consumer from the first attention to the actual purchase of a product. One of the widely used classic models of the marketing funnel is the AIDA model - acronym of Attention, Interest, Desire and Action - with 4 stages through which the consumer passes before buying a product. It is clear therefore that behind any buying behaviour there is a path covered by the consumer, in tourism as well as in any other industry.

This path in the past was influenced by traditional offline advertisement, but nowadays consumers are spending more and more time online, doing research about products and services, comparing prices and choices before purchasing. The conversion funnel is increasingly triggered by multiple channels and touchpoints, where online and offline media reach the consumers in different ways, and online consumers have more and more options to choose from.

Nowadays we consider the conversion funnel as an omni-channel online environment, in the sense that each phase of the visitor journey is created through many different online channels, in a sea of information and choices the travellers confront with and take inspiration from to create their travel experience.

Given the quantity of channels and the broad availability of options, drawing a map of the consumer journey to purchase is becoming extremely complex. Consumers access too many different sources to collect information and the path is less and less linear. Omni-channel marketing is aimed at identifying the different moments in which consumers take decisions to try and influence them with advertisement and content. Given the nature of complexity of the omni-channel environment, nonetheless, it is increasingly difficult to predict consumers’ journeys.

More and more companies emerged to collect data about consumers’ behaviour to try to connect the dots and draw a conclusion on the real traveller’s journey, but the reality if that each consumer is doing it in a more and more personalised way, according to always more specific needs, which makes it more difficult to understand.

Omni-channel marketing is something you're probably already doing. If you run ads on Facebook or Google which retargets specific advertising to visitors who have visited your site, then you're already halfway there.

Today, most marketing tools provide some sort of support for omni-channel marketing, from providing you with snippets of HTML which allow you to track your visitor's journey between your platforms and thirdparty platforms, to measuring engagement and optimising the way in which content is shown or delivered based on behaviour.

If you're just starting out, we recommend taking a look at some of the advanced features that packages like Mailchimp offer, where you can heavily customise your marketing approach based on what you're doing in other channels. Social media planning tools like Falcon, Sprout or Social Bakers on the other hand will allow you to manage your content across multiple platforms and then in the paid marketing features of these suites, you can further optimise ads based on behaviour across multiple platforms.

It's worth noting that even if you're just getting started, most advertisers today - whether it is Google, Facebook or another platform - will at very least allow you to upload your e-mail marketing lists to match and target those users based on their segmentation, as well as place a snippet of code in your website pages to customise messaging to people who visited them.

At the other end of the scale (and be prepared to pay for this....) there are a range of marketing packages, such as Adobe Marketing Cloud, Salesforce and many others, that will charge a significant amount but offer very complex and sophisticated tools, which will truly connect the dots across platforms and even automate much of your communication.

So with these ideas in mind, why not get started as an omni-channel marketer today?

Linear vs. Scattered Models

In the last years we witnessed three big shifts in the digital tourism landscape. The first is the acknowledgement that the traditional visitor cycle no longer exists in such a simple form but it’s becoming massively disrupted and it's really different than what it used to be. The second is the idea that the consumer is connected all the time, really setting the terms and dictating what we should be working on to serve them. The third is the importance of new technology and data and how impactful it is with what we do and how we can use it in a meaningful way.

This shifts in time have changed the traditional model of the visitor cycle from a linear one to a scattered one. The simple journey of awareness, inspiration, discovery, planning, booking, experiencing, sharing and affinity is quite different when we think of it in practice. First of all, because of mobile and social, there is an infinite loop happening, there is a conversation happening in the destination. Therefore impression, reputation, impact, the whole experience, become the very key aspects of marketing, and reputation is everything. Second, the reality of the online space today is one of a scattered web, a mesh of more than 400 different touchpoints for a visitor before they actually take a decision to travel.

It's about blogs, influencers, websites (official and unofficial), booking sites. So the question we have to ask ourselves is how do we have a relevant voice when there's so many places we can be? This is one of the biggest challenges because we can't be everything and we can't be everywhere, so we need to figure out how to engage with the right people in the right place at the right time.

Micro-moments

Considering the multiple touchpoints and the scattered environment in which consumers move around to purchase services, Google recognised that the consumer journey should be seen in a broader way, as a series of moments, or so-called micro-moments.

According to Google , over 40% of travellers say that they bounce back and forth between dreaming and planning about their next trip, in a sort of back and forth while they zoom in and out on the details for one destination. Also, nowadays the majority of time spent on research is made through mobile.

So what exactly are micro-moments?

As the word suggests, they are very short moments of time in which consumers turn to a device with the intent to answer a specific immediate need. These moments summed up one after the other compose the big traveller’s journey. They are generated because travellers increasingly turn to mobile in short spans of time in order to make informed decisions faster than ever before. This phenomenon has very impactful consequences on the entire travel customer journey across devices and channels.

These moments are mainly four:

• I-want-to-get-away moments - the “dreaming moments” In this phase people explore destination ideas with any decision taken. This is the inspiration phase.
• Time-to-make-a-plan moments - the "planning moments" In this phase people have already chosen a destination for their travel. They start looking for the right dates, transport choice, accommodation, and all the things they will experience while at the destination.
• Let’s-book-it-moments - the "booking moments" In this phase the research is done and people are ready to book their services.
• Can't-wait-to-explore moments - the “experiencing moments" In this phase travellers are only waiting to go. They look for more last minute inspiration for things to do at the destination and prepare for the the trip they've been dreaming about.

So how do travel brands strategise based on these moments?

Travel brands need to earn and re-earn each person’s attention and consideration in every micro-moment by being present for them when they need it. This means being on the results page when they look for something on a search engine, be among the promoted content they see on social media or through online advertisement. It’s important to identify the micro-moments of your target consumers and create a strategy to reach them and provide them the information they are looking for.

Digital Consumer Trends

Before starting any process of mapping the visitor journey it’s important to take a look at the trends and understand how consumers are evolving in an increasingly complex digital landscape. We collected the most important digital consumer trends from three of the most important sources of data for digital, travel and tourism - Falcon , Travelport and Skift - and made a list of the 20 most relevant trends in digital consumer behaviour that we are witnessing nowadays.

• People are "wiser" and more informed.
• Globally, 80% of the active internet users are social media users.
• Most people plan trips when already in a destination.
• Consumers are more flexible than before, and free to manage their own time (e.g. they wish to visit a particular destination, they monitor the flight prices and they travel when it is more convenient for them).
• Millennials decide what to visit on Instagram. Inspiration is built on Instagram: what place is more instagrammable?
• The main trend is to put consumers at the core of each strategy and empower them: people are now free to consume, decide how much, what, when and how. Think about the 'time spent' functions on social media: this shows how consumers are let free to monitor, manage and decide about their consumption (it is like Instagram or Facebook taking a step back to respect the consumer).
• Consumers are indeed empowered by the travel industry.
• Visitors have more control on each stage of the cycle (they don't do what they have been told to do, but they do what they want to do).
• Recommendations, reviews, and opinion sharing are becoming exceptionally important.
• The availability of digital tools and booking platforms for transport, accommodation and experiences is exponentially increasing.
• Each platform, including the destination website, is expected to provide products for locals and not only for travellers. This makes an impact in the visitor experience. (Residents look for info about restaurants, want to make local experiences to discover more about where they live).
• If people are highly inspired, they end up purchasing before expected - in fact when people open the booking process by exploring and discovering, the conversion rate is higher than when people go directly on OTA websites.
• Mobile is increasingly important, but the overall visitor cycle is surely omni-channel, since people tend to hop across different devices, especially in the pre-travel stages.
• In 2018 people spent 2.8x the time in WhatsApp than they did on Facebook.
• 80% of what people consume online will soon be video content (Facebook Watch,Vertical video on IGTV, YouTube Original Series) - 60% of all online video views.
• Podcast advertising is growing as well, and branded podcasts are becoming really common. The average weekly listener now consumes over 6.5 hours of podcasts a week.
• Growth in conversational user experience: brands need to be more similar to humans. In fact, we talk about chatbot (85% of customer interactions will be managed by chatbots by 2020), conversational search, voice assistant.
• More than 90% of all Internet searches take place through Google or one of its subsidiaries such as YouTube.
• Visitor seek for more engagement and high-involvement experiences like VR and AR. This is why technologies such as VR and AR can be tools used to disrupt traditional marketing. They make consumers experience the brand in a more tangible and sensory way.
• 79% of consumers care about the so-called Purpose-driven Marketing: content made to share the mission/vision of the brand is far more appreciated and shared. (People appreciate efforts made by companies in terms of environment, sustainability, communities).

The DTTT’s vision on the Visitor Cycle

When it comes to creating a model for the Visitor Cycle it’s important to consider the many and diverse theories drawn by marketers and DMOs. At the DTTT we do believe there is a possible way to depict a model, but we are also aware that many and diverse are the factors influencing it, which are possibly different for each destination marketing organisation.

For this reason, we are working on the creation of the ultimate visitor cycle for DMOs, a model that will help DMOs understand their role in the visitor journey and how to positively influence their vision of the destination creating enough interest to convince them to visit.

We also believe that even though it’s the visitor cycle, it’s not all about the visitor! It’s also and most importantly about the role of the DMO, the cooperation and collaboration with different actors like partners and locals, the content created and published across different channels and the storytelling about the destination made differently at each stage of the cycle.

It is also no longer only about marketing, as we explained in the first chapter of the Transformation Series, The Holistic View.

We agree with five fundamental theories:

• Every traveller’s journey evolves through a timeline, but the timeline is very individual and different for every consumer.
• The journey can be depicted as circular because once the travel experience ends, it can start again.
• There are different main channels and touchpoints to reach the consumers corresponding to each phase of the cycle.
• The role of the DMO has to be clear, with a shared vision and strategy to engage with the visitors in each one of the phases.
• Ultimately, the visitor cycle is a model used as a basis for any strategy created by the DMO, be it the role of the organisation, the involvement of external partners, the choice of channels to reach consumers, the type of content to create for inspiration and information, etc.

We believe that the visitor cycle is made of 6 moments that go from the top of the funnel, when the objective is to spark the interest about the destination, to the full funnel.

Stage 1: Awareness

The first moment is the awareness, when consumers become aware of a destination or experience to do at a particular destination and they are attracted by it. Visitors in this phase consume inspirational content with no conversion goal, like hero videos, travel vlogs on YouTube, Instagram Stories, documentaries on TV.

Their awareness of the destination is getting stronger and stronger thanks to micro-influencers, blogs for niche communities (e.g. people with an interest in sustainable and green tourism) and travel brands they are loyal to and they consult in their free time (e.g. Lonely Planet, Condé Nast Traveller, Beautiful Destinations…). In this phase travellers are reached highly through social media, where online word-of mouth sparks their interest.

Stage 2: Interest

The second moment is the interest. Consumers are already aware of the destination and start thinking about it in a more active way, looking for specific information on what you can see and do at the destination. In this stage travel brands should try to reach consumers through social media like Facebook, Pinterest (image, hacks, hints, check lists…), Instagram (stories and TV). In this phase promotional efforts should play a role in Search Engine Optimisation, PR and traditional media, blog content and Hero Hub Hygiene videos. A good opportunity is to exploit the Dark social - “private sharing of public content on the internet or when a user shares a piece of content with another user in a private medium, and the sharing can't be tracked by marketing analytics.” There is a growing trend linked to private messaging used in marketing to engage with consumers. We talked about the Dark Social in the Digital Consumer Trends Circle meet-up. If you missed it, watch it here.

Stage 3: Planning

The third moment of the cycle is the planning, the phase in which consumers have already chosen the destination of their travel and start to plan their trip by consulting prices and options. The channels used in this phase are Destination Website (App if available), OTAs, Social Media. It is important for the DMO to curate content on the official tourism website, integrating it with trip planner options in order to provide any possible information to the visitor and help them plan their trip.

Stage 4: Conversion

The fourth moment is conversion. This is the most crucial moment for any travel brand, it is the turning point from inspiration to purchase. In this phase consumers are ready to pay for transport, accommodation, experiences, attraction tickets, etc. and they are committing to their plan. The channels used at this point are OTAs, booking tools - including the ones in the DMO's website - TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Airbnb and any other website with integrated booking tools.

Stage 5: Experience

The Visitor Experience is a stage of the visitor cycle that has been ignored by DMOs, as the emphasis has been so heavily focused on building awareness, with very little focus placed on managing the visitor experience.

So many factors in recent years have changed this key stage, which has led DMOs to rethink their role entirely. Above all, the reason we have been steadily rethinking the 'Experiencing' part of the visitor cycle, is because consumers are empowered like never before to be open critics of the experience and service they receive but also empowered as a powerful cog in word-of mouth marketing thanks to the power of social media.

Mobile has also impacted how we think about engaging visitors who are already in the destination. The benchmark you should aim for your destination site to load is 2 seconds, which from our research and experience, almost none do. The reason this 2 second figure is so important? Mobile users expect speed and user experience to be paramount, before switching to alternative sites, apps or channels for information.

If done right, your mobile strategy can both influence the decisions of a 'last minute' millennial traveller, who no longer plans in advance but on the go. At the same time, you can tap-into this engagement by taking steps to ensure your destination has 'shareability' built-in. Achieve results here, requires extremely good partnership programmes with industry, to both maximise the potential of in-destination engagement but also to ensure they're not missing out on potential visitors because of poor mobile experience.

Stage 6: Sharing

The last moment of the cycle is sharing. Travellers have completed their travel experience and they already went back home. In this phase they are sharing their experience with family, friends, peers and online readers, posting photos and videos, writing reviews and articles about their trip and possibly already thinking about going back to the destination in the future. The channels used in this phase are social media, travel blogs and review platforms.

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