How to responsibly market your travel destination

The global travel industry is becoming increasingly focused on promoting sustainable and responsible tourism – and with good reason.

It’s the best way to ensure that the incredible destinations travellers love can stay with us for generations. However, over-tourism and unsustainable practices can (and have) lead to environmental damage, fractured local communities and overall lacklustre travel experiences for visitors venturing to the destination they’ve been dreaming of. 

We only need to look at destinations like Uluru in July 2019, or what the cruise industry has done to Venice (pre-pandemic) to understand how over-tourism can impact a destination. 

So, with sustainability at the forefront of travel experiences, how can we responsibly market our destinations? 

We believe the key to responsible and sustainable tourism lies in modern marketing. Utilising valuable data sets at hand to attract not only the right number of visitors for your region, but the highest-yielding clientele is a great step toward sustainability both environmentally and economically.

Our data partnership with Webjet.com.au allows us to help destinations manage visitation to a suitable level throughout the year, during both the peaks and troughs.

By using verified deterministic data destination marketers can evolve from traditional marketing practices and align the right data set with the best technology to not only attract visitors to the region, but to attract visitors who will deliver maximum economic benefit, whilst protecting their region from over-tourism and maintaining the community lifestyle enjoyed by locals. 

Additionally, using deterministic data to personalise a destination’s offering also increases dispersal across the entire region. Where a destination may be promoted as a fly-and-flop beach location that is often overcrowded, there is often a variety of additional activities such as fine dining, wineries and breweries, cultural sites, and adventure activities that go under-promoted. Leaning into the interests of the traveller, because you have the right data set to identify them, allows for economic sustainability by encouraging dispersal. 

This targeting means you avoid the homogenisation of a region and opens up a variety of travel vendors who cater towards a multitude of trip-types – strengthening the breadth of the travel industry for your destination. 

By enabling these data strategies, our clients work with locals to sustain long term tourism, by promoting the diversity of a destination. This avoids negatively impacting local communities, environmental sustainability and longevity as a holiday spot. 

Timing your marketing to ensure sustainable, ethical and responsible tourism can be much easier with the right dataset. To find out more about how we can help you market in a sustainable way, get in touch with our team.