Travel Firms Leverage Internet Search To Attract Customers

Consumers conduct more than 3.5 billion searches every day on Google, and savvy travel agents, tour operators and other travel vendors know that prioritizing Google search optimization and marketing can generate dramatic returns. 

Take Mint Julep Tours. The Louisville, KY, firm has invested strategically in Google marketing and attributes the bulk of its new customer acquisition and a 70% annual growth rate to its activities on Google.  

Co-owners Sean and Lisa Higgins started offering custom tours of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, Kentucky Horse Farms and the City of Louisville in 2008, operating out of their home. At the time, the Louisville area tourism and bourbon industries were investing millions in marketing the newly developed Kentucky Bourbon Trail. Distilleries were preparing to host large groups.  

Joining the online conversation
“We could see that there was a conversation starting on the web about bourbon and the bourbon industry. We wanted to get in early on that,” Sean Higgins said.  

Mint Julep, which Conde Nast Traveler rated the second best guided drinking tour in America in 2014, launched a website and bought a bus to take travelers to Louisville landmarks like the Maker’s Mark distillery and the Kentucky Derby.  

The next investment the Higgins made was in Google Adwords, so that Mint Julep would appear prominently when a consumer was searching for bourbon tours or related search terms.  

Three quarters of Mint Julep’s business is corporate, so it’s important for Mint Julep to be visible when a meeting or event planner is looking for a tour like those Mint Julep offers.  

Expanding its reach
Google Adwords also gives Mint Julep a platform to advertise outside the city. Nine out of 10 tours are booked by individuals or companies outside of Louisville, and increasingly, Higgins said, he’s receiving bookings from beyond North America.  

“We’re finding this is a global marketplace. We had 60 people in from Spain recently. We get bookings from Asia, Australia and Latin America.” 

Today, Mint Julep spends less than 5% of its overall company revenue on Google marketing, Higgins said, and receives about 400 monthly online leads. He estimates that 84% of Mint Julep’s business comes via the Internet. 

“You can directly equate at least 30% of our growth to the tools and advantages that the Internet has established,” said Higgins. 

The company also has an active YouTube video library, with more than 20 videos that have more than 17,600 views. 

Using Google data to refine marketing
The longer Mint Julep works with Google, the more data it acquires through Google Analytics, so it can refine and target its marketing better, Higgins said. For example, the company realized that Chicago was a big market because of the large number of Google searches coming from users there.  

Fine-tuning their advertising grows more important every year as more businesses compete with Mint Julep for the same Google search users. “Big guys like Jim Beam are bidding the same AdWords as we are. They’re brand building at $1 to $1.25 a click, which ups what we pay. So we have to use our dollars efficiently.” 

One important insight into the market was gender. “We used to profile men 35 to 55 who search for bourbon and whiskey. But we found that 60% of the people who find us are women, who might be purchasing a tour for, say, their husband’s 40th birthday,” Higgins said. 

Family resort learns to leverage online search
Capon Springs and Farms, a family resort in Capon Springs, WV., has had a similar experience trying to understand who might look for them online and how best to convert those searches into bookings, said Jonathan Bellingham, marketing manager. 

Located 100 miles west of Washington, DC, and open seven months a year, the family-owned resort has a specific issue it needs to solve. “We’re unique. We’re a resort with a camp-like atmosphere. Seventy five percent of our business is repeat, year after year, filling our resort to capacity during the summer. What we’re looking for are those new summer customers, especially weekday traffic, and that little bit of business in the spring and fall shoulder seasons,” Bellingham said. 

For about 10 years, the resort relied heavily on email marketing, but that wasn’t bringing in the next generation of customers. Capon Springs needed to try something new.  

“One day, we went on Google and we pretended we were someone looking for us,” Bellingham said. “Who could be searching for us? Where are they?” 

The search prominently featured results from a website called resortsandlodges.com and from a second, retreatcentral.com. Capon Springs now advertises through the two sites, but is expanding its marketing to other sites where Google searches land a potential customer. 

“What I am learning is it’s a combination of our own site and developing network partners, like local chambers, people already pulling interested customers into their space,” Bellingham said. 

Capon Springs and Farms saw more than 6% additional guests and an 8% jump in revenue in 2015. Now, it’s putting together a major marketing campaign for the 2017 vacation season.