Skift Take
By segmenting the personalities of their individual neighborhoods, cities like San Francisco have more options to align their visitor experiences with different visitor profiles. That customization helps cities expand their destination image, build destination loyalty, and boost repeat visitation.
Every tourism and convention bureau wants to improve repeat visitation rate to the destination, both on the leisure and meetings side, but there's never really been an effective strategy to do so.
Unlike the hotel, theme park, cruise, tour operator, and airline industries, destinations don't have a point of sale. There's no digital turnstile, so to speak, so there's no way to develop a loyalty program around a series of incentives and rewards to help drive repeat bookings.
Over the last few years, however, some U.S. bureaus have developed a neighborhood marketing strategy to increase the rate of return visitors by leveraging the surging rise of interest in local travel experiences.
Basically, organizations like San Francisco Travel are positioning their city as a network of neighborhoods with distinct individual identities, versus a homogenous whole, in an effort to connect with different traveler segments on a more personalized level. Other urban markets are doing something similar — such as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., Miami, and Dallas — but San Francisco is the first to diversify the strategy to also target the meetings industry.
Bureaus are promoting their neighborhoods by developing prominent online maps, usually on their website homepages, linking to content that segments and showcases the unique attributes of their major communities. A sample of that in San Francisco is this story about dining in the Mission District. The primary purpose is to help bureaus customize the search experience for the individual end user. The maps also work as effective naviga
