The Insider's Guide to Promoting a Destination's Reputation

Travel Appeal has released our latest eBook, ‘The Insider’s Guide to Promoting a Destination’s Reputation’. We explore the truth between data and reality and reveal the key concepts behind a destination's reputation. You’ll also uncover the best tips to monitor brand reputation and increase visitor sentiment. Continue reading for a sneak peek!

Increase the attractiveness of your destination by taking advantage of online reviews and customer feedback.

Navigating the jungle of data and online content can be tricky when developing promotional strategies for your destination. Whether you’re promoting a neighborhood, city, region or country, the marketing methods implemented are similar to those of a tangible product. The first step should always be defining your target market, their needs and desires.

By analyzing and managing online reviews and visitor feedback, you can uncover correlations and insights about your destination. For instance, is your destination mostly attracting foreign families? Millennial backpackers? Local retirees? Discover the aspects of your destination that are most and least appreciated. Understanding your destination’s reputation is pivotal when creating business strategies. Let’s dig in!

Leveraging a Destination’s Reputation

Throughout the eBook, we describe three main types of notoriety: solicited notoriety, spontaneous notoriety and TOP (top of mind) Awareness.

The metric you should monitor depends on your goals. For an emerging and/or small destination, it makes little sense to compare metrics like Top of Mind or spontaneous notoriety. Meanwhile, it’s much more practical to monitor changes through solicited notoriety.

Discover which metric is best to monitor your destination in the eBook!

“Reputation as…” and Your Destination

The "reputation as..." concept is the association of a destination to an image, theme, idea or feature. For example, Paris has a reputation for being synonymous with style, fashion and romance while Tuscany is the quintessential place for rolling hills and Italian living.

Often the reputation of a tourist destination is a simplified and widely shared opinion about a place. It’s important to clarify the images your destination is linked to as they have a great influence on travelers' expectations and perceptions.

Reputation and Sentiment

The reputation of a destination describes what and how visitors think and feel about a specific location. These opinions are also expressed online through reviews, posts and photos. Because travel is such a high-engagement purchase, travelers commonly inquire about where to spend their holidays by consulting several sources - advice from family/friends, social media, travel blogs and review channels.

Travelers are also keen to share their experiences at a destination - hotels, restaurants, museums and other attractions. Reviews on TripAdvisor or Yelp could make or break your destination’s reputation.

As a result, rankings, indexes and sentiment analysis tools have been increasingly integrated. Algorithms have been designed to measure and understand the attitudes of those commenting about a hotel, attraction or destination.

Evaluating the behaviors of travelers before and during their stay is crucial. Uncover what made them choose a specific destination, hotel or restaurant. Discover what they most and least enjoyed. Reputation management tools are in place to assist destination managers and marketers improve their strategies.

Download the free eBook to keep reading and uncover the top 7 tips to optimize the reputation of your destination!