Greg Oates

Destination marketers face a new imperative to refine and align their culinary experience branding and marketing strategies to connect with today’s digitally savvy traveler. Even non-traditional tourist destinations must commit to smarter branding and marketing strategy, in order to capture sustained tourism in-flows. Here, stakeholders must work together to hone their content strategies and build local networks to bring out the best of what destinations can offer.

Driven by shifting consumer profiles and a demand for personalized discovery, luxury travel is evolving beyond its traditional parameters. Luxe travel brands are meeting these needs by developing more nuanced options for immersive destination experiences so consumers can customize their entire travel journey.

Hotels are promoting and engaging their local communities and partnering with a growing array of local independent businesses in an effort to create more options for travelers seeking “authentic” experiences.

Over the last decade, the world’s most innovative hotels and hotel brands have developed as portals into their destinations’ local communities. To communicate that experience to guests, hotels are developing sophisticated online content marketing that positions the hotel as a character in a traveler’s journey.

The convention of the future is a co-created hybrid mechanism of live and virtual engagement, fluidly connecting more people through more channels over longer periods of time to leverage the collective knowledge of the community.

The hotel meetings and events industry is going through a radical evolution due to new communication technologies, Millennial psychographics, and a rethinking of the overall purpose and value. Pop culture events like TED and SXSW are also changing the perspective of what’s possible at conferences, but are meeting planners and hospitality executives jumping on these trends fast enough?

With Millennials expected to soon surpass Boomers in overall travel spending, hotels, booking sites and destination marketing organizations (DMOs) are retooling their product, branding, business models and communication methods. Here’s what they should prepare for.

Hotels are attracting the next generation traveler by engaging with their local communities to provide more authentic and immersive travel experiences.