Mamana reflects on tourism planning timeline and international visitors
Mamana says NYC Tourism would have started earlier on international visitation if funding had come sooner. She says the campaign still produced positive borough dispersion and intent to visit Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island.
I would love to pile on to that point.
We put together our initial proposal for our incremental funding about a year prior.
Had we started then, and this is all hindsight, but it's good learning for the future, we would have started really focusing on driving international visitation at that time because the planning windows are longer for international visitors.
They spend more, they're valuable, and that's very strategic.
We know when folks from Canada versus Japan
typically tend to plan.
By the time
this really kicked in, which was really at the end of March, we had to shift.
And that's okay.
I think we got different KPIs out of this.
We were not able, the occupancy and demand were fairly flat, but we did see increases in the boroughs, not in Manhattan.
So that's great.
However, I think the dispersion was what we really focused on with every opportunity.
And we did see positive impact across every tactic.
When we partnered with NBC and Telemundo, we did not focus on Broadway and Times Square.
We focused on Mott Haven.
We saw almost a 44% increase in intent to visit Brooklyn.
We saw a 40% increase intent to go to Queens, 24% in the Bronx, 13% in Staten Island.
This is impactful because it primes the pump for us moving forward.
So now we get ready to do a campaign in the fall that goes into next year.
We're going to leverage the digital media and the audiences that we built and the momentum we built.
So it was a very positive experience.
I think a lot of folks saw the organic content that came up in social media.
People had a wonderful time here.
So we're leveraging it.
I think we feel it was successful from a dispersion perspective.
But I think we would have shifted a little bit if we had more time on really driving that visitor when we were experiencing a lot of headwinds with international travel going in.
So all in, I think that and the coordinated campaign really helped amplify the message when we're all saying the same thing at the same time.