Sustainable Tourism is the Untamed Frontier of Luxury Travel

The term “sustainable” is bandied so frequently around in tourism circles, that it is easy to connection with the real meaning behind the sustainability movement. The word is used in so many different ways, from a throw-away synonym for “environmentally-friendly”, to using in a hole in the ground for a bathroom, or sleuthing through a phrase book to learn “soy milk” in Portuguese. Sustainability doesn’t mean sacrificing the pleasures that make travel special, and it certainly doesn’t fly in direct opposition to the idea of luxury travel.

Sustainability in travel is about keeping destinations and communities thriving and beautiful for future generations. It is an understanding that you are a small part in the long story of a place or a people, and that should be preserved long after you are gone.It is about rewarding those businesses who understand the fragility of the intrinsic attraction of the destination and do everything in their power to protect that, channelling the demand itself toward preservation.

Take Machu Picchu, for example. In the century since its “rediscovery”, the citadel has become a UNESCO World Heritage Site and opened up to tourists from all over the world. But very quickly up to 5,000 tourists a day were visiting an archaeological site that was only designed to house a few hundred Incan aristocrats. In 2017, the Peruvian government implemented restrictions to limit the number of visiting tourists and enforced a framework to ensure that Machu Picchu will exist for centuries to come. At the core of sustainable travel is a well measured, balanced approach to secure preservation, longevity, the retention of authenticity and ensure benefits flow back to the local community.

Sustainable doesn’t have to mean basic. Down the mountain from Machu Picchu, the Inkaterra Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel is an example of sustainable tourism at its most luxurious. The hotel is built into the mountainous “cloud forest”, and is modelled after ancient Incan villages. The spa specialises in traditional health and wellness treatments, and the restaurant serves outstanding Peruvian specialties created with locally-sourced, organic ingredients. Water is recycled and cleaned before it is let back into the river system, and every soap, detergent and shampoo is made from local natural ingredients. Guests can take nature walks with local guides who proudly exhibit the wild beauty of Peru’s rainforest.

While that may not sound particularly ground-breaking, these small changes minimise the hotel’s footprint on the surrounding environment, maximise its investment in the local community. It is all presented in a unique and luxurious way.

Increasingly, travellers are demanding sustainable environments on their holidays, and are willing to pay more for these. Today’s luxury holiday experiences simply must be created through a sustainability lense. Travellers want to sleep easy in the knowledge that their holiday money is working to help the locals and to preserve the very cultures and environments that have attracted them in the first place, for many generations to come.

Narrowcasting: The Future of PR Placements

If you were to visit any travel media website, the most popular format of article doesn’t answer the question “where should I go?” or “what should I see?”, but some form of “what should I do?” For the modern traveller, the driving force has shifted from ticking off a bucketlist item, to using travel as a form of self expression and a new environment in which to engage in their passions and interests.

The impetus is clear; Successful travel marketing requires storytelling about how travellers can get involved in the activities that they love.

While broadcast and syndicated print media continues to offer huge reach and readership numbers, which do have impact (and look fantastic in reports), but often the message can be quite generic, to cater to such broad markets. Contradicting established logic, placing stories in small, niche, and specialised media is where the future of travel PR is heading. Why? Because the energy to drive action is far more potent the more targeted the story can be. Narrowcasting is where the conversion lies.

Mass awareness broadcasting has certainly not become irrelevant, and still has an important place in the media cycle. In the initial phases of a brand breaking the local market, creating mass awareness drives incredible momentum for a brand in the public eye. But narrowcasting gives us the opportunity to move a consumer along the funnel from thinking “what can I do in this destination?”, to “how can I do what I love in this destination?”

Narrowcasting does exactly that; targeting PR placements to environments where audiences are engaged, informed, and most importantly, ready to buy. If the name doesn’t give it away, it is the opposite of broadcasting; moving away from mass-reach, low-impact PR placements to targeting small segments of the population who are hungry for content that relates to their lives. It’s putting away the drag net and getting out the spear-gun.

In July 2018, the California’s Pacific Coast Highway was reopened to the public after months of repairs following a devastating landslide in 2017. To celebrate the reopening, Visit California hosted a “Dream Drive”, with over 80 historic vehicles driving in convoy along a 200 kilometre stretch of the coast.

One of the drivers invited for this trip was Australian V8 Supercars legend, Craig Lowndes, who had recently announced his retirement from the sport. Aside from the broad newsworthiness of the reopening of the highway, Lowndes’ participation meant that there was keen interest in the event from both sporting and motoring media, delivering the key messaging directly to audiences where it would have the most impact.

Gate 7 was able to lock in coverage for the event in titles as broad as Fox Sports, to niche non-travel publications such as SpeedCafe, and RedBook. Further, a partnership with Channel 10’s motor-sport program RPM, secured nearly 10-minutes of niche, passion-focused television coverage directly to enthusiasts who would look to drive the iconic stretch of coastline; far more coverage than we could have hoped to garner through traditional wide media distribution.

In this new status quo, where there’s a more balanced focus between mass reach and narrowcast placements, the challenge of measurement and ROI becomes a lot more complex than measurements of reach and readership. How do we weight the increased impact of more targeted placements? In digital publications, understanding engagement levels through analytics that point to page-dwell times, bounce rates, and comments is already commonplace, but of course quantifying these sentiments in print presents a more difficult challenge.

It’s not an easy challenge. Together with our clients, we are looking for ways to correlate specific brand messages to the level of context in the publications where placements are achieved. Travel PR, after all, is the art of leveraging media relationships to build a public image, which drives tourism to a destination or product, not simply to accrue large reach numbers for the sake of hitting quotas or besting previous goals.

Get Vocal, Get Local

Social media is such a powerful and revolutionary marketing tool. It allows brands to talk directly with consumers in unfiltered ways utilising a huge range of content types and styles, as well as listen to their real time feedback.

Australian and New Zealand audiences are globally ranked as some of the earliest adopters of new technology and social media platforms. Combined with their larrikin sense of humour and high levels of education, this makes social a primary medium for international brands catering to the market.

As both countries start to look at emerging from the global COVID-19 crisis in a relatively strong position, their travel markets are itching to start moving again. Connecting with Australians and New Zealanders has never been a better market strategy for international brands. Launching, and maintaining a social media presence can be a minefield, so here are five tips from the Gate 7 social team to help you create or refine a local social strategy.

1. Think Global, Post Local

In Australia and New Zealand, social media users are easily turned off by content that is cookie-cut for international audiences. Preference is shown to brands that make the effort to localise their content, voice and design to cater to local tastes and needs.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean that everything needs to be created from scratch for the local market. Before you rush headlong into preparations for a brand new social media page built from the ground up, it may be more efficient, cost effective, and impactful to leverage key elements from the global page.

Since 2012, Facebook has offered a very powerful, but often overlooked feature, known as the Facebook Global Page. For a large portion of big-name brands, products and destinations, the platform allows pages to segment out sub-sections of their audience into individually-managed regional pages to give a more unique local flavour to content, while still accessing the resources of the global page.

2. Authentic Content

In the social media landscape, authenticity is king; Users are interacting with brands on a personal level and what they see must ring true and deeply reflect the key brand values that attracted them to follow. The strongest content strategy is focussed on bringing your strengths to life in your brand’s authentic tone of voice.

The same evaluation that you would have made of your brand’s values for public relations and marketing purposes will fit into a social context, with slight adjustments to be made to your voice, as you’ll be speaking directly to consumers over social media. Set out your “visual narrative” and define your general aesthetic, personality and tone of voice. These are the foundations of the content plan.

Create structure around your messaging pillars; what are the USPs you want to bring to life, the key messages you want to share with your audience? Built upon your content plan that will see you deliver these messages in a considered and consistent manner.

3. Measure Twice, Post Once

Establishing a set of KPI’s and measures and frequently checking in with these will give you the opportunity to learn what’s resonating best and adjust your content accordingly. This is a two way conversation, so you need to be listening to what your audience is coming back to you with.

The huge number of tools available to marketers on social media platforms mean that there is no one-size-fits-all, guaranteed strategy home-run for your brand. The ever-evolving algorithms that rule the roost of Facebook and Instagram also force marketers to continually experiment with their content strategies to maximise results. Keep researching what works for others, but remember that there’s nothing better than your own historical data.

4. Build Community. Boost Engagement. Rinse. Repeat.

Upon launch, your focus should be on building up an audience of fans and followers. Put budget into background ads that will spread your content to a broad audience that you can refine down to people interested in your product or service.

Once the foundation of your community has been achieved and the initial growth surge has subsided, moving to create highly engaging content, responding to followers and fans with comments and sharing similar content will push up your engagement rate. A higher engagement rate then boosts your positioning in most social media platforms’ algorithms, and in turn leads to a higher growth rate with followers.

5. Bring All Your Friends to the Party

The best part of social media is that it is inherently interconnected, both for the average user and for commercial pages. As a brand you can directly interact with other brands, public figures and influencers, and leverage their social capital, audiences and content creation skills to boost your brand’s own profile.

Engaging with an aligned brand or commercial partner can be a very beneficial way to expose your message to a like minded audience. Consumer competitions, activations and sponsored posts in partnership with known and trusted local brands can facilitate you becoming a part of the conversation with that community and expand your reach and following in the process.

Working in partnership with influencers who are appropriately selected for their like minded audience and their skillful content creation is another impactful way to make a splash on social media. A great many influencers will go the extra mile to produce incredible content for a brand that appeals to their interests, and they have a loyal following which gives them great sway.
A final, and far less expensive method of leveraging other pages’ reach is to simply interact with similar pages, with comments, likes and shares, effectively tapping into the conversations others are having with your target community.