Research Solutions
Research Solutions
GRS offers a number of research solutions to common destination marketing problems, and we’d love to help solve a problem for you. If one of the methods we offer below doesn’t suit your needs, we do LOTS of special custom projects and we’ve probably already done it. Reach out and let us know how we can help!
Understand how your destination is perceived in your target markets including differences between markets. Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not around, and this study investigates that. What do regular leisure travelers from different markets think about your destination, and what’s different between people who have visited you before and people who haven’t? We ask a random panel of regular leisure visitors to tell us what they think about you, how you differ from your competitors, whether they’ve been, the most appealing tourism assets, product development ideas, and much more. This method does not require an email database or list, and prices depend on the sample size and number of markets chosen.
Get clarity on who your visitors are, why they visit you, and which segments should be prioritized in marketing. Who is your customer? Big data can tell you where they live, when they come and where they go, but can never answer WHY they come. To understand what drives visitors, there is no substitute for actual conversations with real visitors during their visit. Trained researchers speak in-person with your visitors in order to learn all we can about their visits and divide visitors into groups (aka segments) based on their behaviors and traits. From there we can determine who the most valuable visitors are for your destination, what they are looking for in their visits, and how you can more effectively connect with them. This method is great for targeted marketing initiatives including developing marketing personas, planning media strategies, developing new tourism products, and more. A full study typically takes a full year in order to balance interviews by season, but seasonal highlights are also available.
Understand who you are communicating with in your marketing (who are often your most valuable visitors). Unfortunately not every visitor uses a visitors guide, a destination website, or follows a DMO on social media. The group of travelers that end up in your newsletter or inquiry database only represent a portion of your visitors overall. BUT these are also your most loyal and engaged visitors, and the people you as a DMO are most likely to be reaching. The email database and social media following that you’ve been working to build are some of your most valuable assets, and this method takes advantage of those resources. Your list most likely includes a mix of visitors, non-visitors, and regional residents, meaning that we will end up with multiple perspectives on your destination. We’ll learn what appeals to visitors and residents as well as barriers for non-visitors. This method is especially affordable because we use your visitor contacts! And, if you pair it with a Visitor Profile Study of visitor intercepts on the ground, you can learn exactly what portion and type of visitors you’re reaching and how you might be able to reach more of them.
Quantify the types of visitors that stay overnight in your destination, so you can be sure about who your target visitors are and who they are NOT. Lodging partners are enormously important for our local tourism economies. They are also valuable sources of information on overnight visitors to your destination. In fact, they are the best source to understand exactly who comes to visit overnight and in what proportions. First we look at lodging analytics that describe overnight patterns on hotels and vacation rentals (e.g., Smith Travel Research, AirDNA, Granicus, existing tax records, etc.) in terms of supply, demand, occupancy, average daily rate, and revenue. Then, we combine those insights with a confidential and customized survey of lodging partners to gather the information that only lodging partners know, like what percentage of your rooms are sold to business travelers? Conference/meeting travelers? Leisure travelers? How does that change by season? We’ll include all types of lodging like campgrounds, B&Bs, cabins, and more. If the destination is strong in short term rentals, we’ll talk to hosts. This method is a great way to engage lodging partners and also share valuable insights back to them about the destination.
Fancy Qualitative Methods
Dig deep into who your target visitors are and what drives them. Sometimes you just need to know more. You want more detail, more context, more “why” around your customers. What REALLY drives them? GRS is trained in anthropological (google “ethnographic”) methods that are proven to reveal the relevant customs, habits, and mutual differences between types of people, and especially WHY they do what they do. We regularly conduct focus groups and in-depth interviews, either in person or via Zoom, to expand on our survey (quantitative) learnings. We also conduct in-depth digital ethnographies, where visitors are invited to participate in a research initiative BEFORE their first visit to your destination and provide their reactions and experiences while they’re visiting. There is SO MUCH to be learned from visitors as they are experiencing their visit, and a digital ethnography is the gold standard for in-depth understanding.
Find out why meeting planners choose your destination for their events, and why they DON’T.
Group travel is a significant portion of annual visitation for many destinations, and a lot has changed since the pandemic. So how do we learn more about why meeting planners select your destination, or why they DON’T? We ask them. By engaging meeting planners (and paying them an incentive for their time) we can learn about planners’ perceptions of your destination as a meetings destination, assets and liabilities in terms of delivering great meetings, planners’ wish lists (what could have improved their experience planning and meeting in your destination), and more. Most importantly, if planners ultimately decided against your destination for their meeting, they can explain why. From this, we are able to nail down the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to attracting meetings in your destination and how you can be strategic about expanding this audience within your destination.
Get fast feedback on emergent issues, new ideas, or creative designs from your most engaged visitors throughout the year.
If you love data and wish you had more regular feedback from your visitors, let us build you your very own panel of visitors and prospects. By asking your most engaged visitors if they would be willing to receive short surveys from time to time in exchange for an incentive (either cash or a chance to win a trip), you have a ready audience that can be queried on all kinds of things. How will their travel change in the future? Where else do they visit that is similar to your destination? How do they talk about your destination to others? Do they like this ad creative or that ad creative? Does this initiative we’re thinking about spending money on resonate with them? The sky’s the limit for the things you can ask, and the feedback is VERY quick and effective.
GRS will manage and host your research panel, and work with you throughout the year to design smart and useful questions. You’ll never be in the dark again about how your visitors feel.
Use data and visualizations to illustrate the short term rental landscape in your community and demonstrate the importance of managing it. Every community is different in terms of state and local tax regulations, host licensing and compliance, but all face a need to get their arms around the short term rentals in their community before the situation becomes unmanageable. Often the only way to show the importance of monitoring and managing short term rentals to stakeholders is using data and easy-to-understand visualizations. We have a particular interest in the short term rental industry and how communities are adapting to its incredible growth. We dig into the situation, using data to lay out the landscape and prove the value of short term rental revenue and the resulting tax obligations.
Customized Solutions
If the methods outlined above don’t quite meet your needs, let us custom design a study for you. Much of what we do at GRS is customized, meaning each survey, discussion guide, interview or focus group is specific to your destination and assets. We’re really good at figuring out the best ways to ask the right questions to get you the insights you need. We’ll develop a methodology that fits your needs and your research budget and leaves you feeling like a hero