Reaching across all points of the booking journey

Challenge

As one of the world’s premiere resort destinations, awareness of Whistler remains high. But to transform broad brand awareness into bookings, Tourism Whistler needed something more. To compete with major global destinations with significantly more resources, the DMO challenged us to find a way to continue to drive results, improve key corporate sales metrics and (most importantly) increase resort bookings.

Approach

We created a detailed hyper-targeting strategy to ensure Tourism Whistler was able to reach travellers across the booking journey. We leveraged the DMO’s rich data along each stage of that journey to focus in on several micro-segments of our core target audience. A digitally-focused approach allowed us to not only scale our budget in larger international markets, but reach consumers in the environment that most travel planning and booking occurs. Throughout the journey, we activated first, second and third-party audiences to drive maximum performance and constantly optimize the performance of Tourism Whistler’s creative.

Results

Year over year, key performance metrics continue to improve. Digital response rates increased 49% and are now well above industry norms. Bookings continue to go up, particularly in resort shoulder seasons (spring and fall). At the same time, campaign costs have decreased dramatically: cost per video completions decreased 20% and cost per acquisition fell 23%.