Marketing tips

The Hawaiian government this week rescinded the Hawaii Tourism Authority’s U.S. tourism contract with the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, a community non-profit, providing a potential setback for the authority’s sustainable tourism efforts. The reason for the government’s rescission was that the contract needed to be separated into two, one for marketing and the other for visitor management and community relations.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Wednesday, December 21, and here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

If the pandemic taught the travel industry anything, it is that change is necessary. For some local tourism officials in the U.S., transformation had been under way well before 2020, but new plans to serve visitors and local communities alike crystallized in the past year.

Skift Megatrends is arguably our largest companywide exercise every year, and we’ve been making our research-driven and editorially informed prognostications for a decade now.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, December 22, and here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

United Airlines launched a new era in branding for the company this year when it unveiled its Good Leads the Way marketing campaign, its largest advertising effort in a decade.

Hyatt has been active in recent months devising creative ways to market its brands while competing against home rental platforms at the same time. So what’s the main message Hyatt has been conveying to prospective guests?

In a departure from the typical rose-tinted travel campaign, luxury rental booking platform Plum Guide sent individuals dressed as grim reapers around London this month with the stark message “The End Is Nigh” around their cloaks.

New Mexico visitor spend jumped more than 30 percent in the past two years, with the state seeing a significant tourism boom partly because of the New Mexico Tourism Department’s longstanding tourism campaign, New Mexico True. 

Success in luxury hotel marketing was a little more black and white before the world became more woke. That’s the reality facing The Peninsula Hotels, which last week launched its Peninsula Perspectives campaign. A review of three ads from the campaign — set in Hong Kong, Istanbul, and London — reveals the high bar for success facing all luxury brands in marketing in an evolving media era.

Although travel is poised to continue making progress in its ongoing recovery in 2023, the industry still faces challenges in its quest to surpass pre-pandemic tourism levels.

Ireland is taking the next step in its comeback as the country’s tourism board recently unveiled a new $84 million marketing campaign with the goal of boosting visitor revenue beyond pre-pandemic levels. 

British holidays group Saga Plc on Tuesday warned that its travel business could report a small underlying loss in 2022-23, before returning to a profit next year.

In an effort to combat the hold that online travel agencies have on the hotel market, Trivago is focusing on building a capability for direct access between hotels and travelers. 

It’s tough for a National Football League team to make a return trip in two consecutive years to the Super Bowl, but online travel company Booking.com will be doing just that with a fourth quarter advertisement during the telecast.

Exoticca, a Barcelona-based online travel agency focused on affordable luxury tours and vacation packages, launched its first-ever brand campaign this year. The campaign, titled What a Time to be Alive, debuted in early January with TV spots in Canada and the United Kingdom and digital ads in the United States, Mexico and Spain.

Hong Kong leader John Lee unveiled on Thursday a promotion campaign that will include 500,000 free flights to lure visitors, businesses and investors back to the financial hub after more than three years of tough Covid-19 curbs.

A smart new campaign launched by Hilton, highlighting its connected rooms feature, for travelers looking for larger spaces when booking family or group travel. First in this “Connecting Room Concerts” series, a performance from Brandi Carlile, six-time Grammy-Awards winner – and nominated seven times for tonight’s 2023 Grammys Awards – from a pair of connected rooms at The Beverly Hilton.

Corporate travel agency TripActions is rebranding to Navan, Skift has learned.

It’s another earnings season so online travel companies such as Airbnb, Expedia and Tripadvisor occasionally present facts in a misleading — or at least in an exceedingly positive-sounding — way.

The Hawaii Tourism Authority put two contracts up to bid, one for marketing to the U.S. and the other for destination management, on February 14.  The two contracts are essentially a split of the previous one that included both responsibilities and had been awarded to a community non-profit. A government official canceled the it minutes before his term ended on December 5.