Destination Marketing

*NEW* A co-op program with Expedia was launched in March to promote Greater Palm Springs to audiences searching for travel around the upcoming Soccer World Championships in June. The program includes a custom site on Expedia that engages travelers and encourages booking travel around upcoming soccer events. As the main sponsor, Greater Palm Springs has the sole top-featured position on the co-op site, as well as a dedicated subpage, along with digital and social ads promoting the campaign. As of the end of May, the campaign has generated over 9,500 hotel and vacation rental nights and over $3M in gross bookings.  

*NEW* We re-engaged with Edge Media, a leading LGBTQ+ travel and content site, this spring ahead of upcoming Pride Month celebrations. The program included updated content articles, geofenced social media content served around Pride events, social media posts, and digital banner ads. The campaign has generated over 2.5M impressions.  

For March, April, and May:  

• Expedia generated 16.8M impressions inclusive of all campaigns, including Expedia and VRBO, as well as our Visit California co-op and new Soccer World Championship campaign. As a result of these campaigns, over 58K hotel room nights and 22K vacation rental room nights were booked, were booked, for a total of $30.8M in revenue.  
• The TripAdvisor campaign generated 13.5M impressions, which resulted in $807K in hotel revenue and a total economic impact of $2.3M.  
• Sojern generated 13.7M impressions which resulted in 1,182 room nights booked and a total economic impact of $53.3M.  
• Our Travelzoo partner promotion campaign continued with the promotion of our Destination Showcase page, which resulted in 1.6M impressions and over 19.7K partner clicks.  
• Basis programmatic campaigns generated 4.2M impressions. We ran multiple campaigns via this platform, including "Escape Your Ordinary" and "Born to Chill" brand campaigns, Oasis of Art, Weather Channel, Vacation Rental, and Benefits of Tourism. 
• Nativo’s native advertising platform generated 1.3M impressions, highlighting content and videos from our brand campaigns and dedicated vacation rental campaign.  
• IGLTA newsletters continued to run in advance of the upcoming global convention in October. Our refreshed banner ads were included on IGLTA’s website as well, generating a total of 60.2K impressions.  
• Content programs ran across key travel and publication sites like Fodors, DogTrekker, Sunset magazine, and Locale, resulting in 3.8M impressions.  
• Clicktivated’s interactive video programs supported the "Escape Your Ordinary" campaign with a clickable video format, promoting locations highlighted within the video. This generated 598K impressions. 
• Perion (formerly Undertone) served a high-impact page takeover ad unit with interactive content highlighting our "Escape Your Ordinary" campaign for the spring season. This generated 1.2M impressions from March through May as well as over 37K clicks within the interactive ad unit.  
• Our Visit California program with Hopper promoted the destination on Capital One’s travel booking site for cardholders, as part of their partnership with the platform. The campaign included digital placements, voucher promotions, and destination messaging within Visit California’s hub on Hopper, generating over 1,800 hotel bookings and $978K in revenue during this period.  
• Our domestic co-op campaigns with Visit California launched in November and continue to run through the end of June across Expedia, TripAdvisor, Sojern, AdTheorent, and Booking.com. The campaign has resulted in 23.9M impressions.                                                                                             

Vacation rentals are incorporated into our overall consumer marketing campaign year-round. This includes television spots, out-of-home, social media, digital video content, and blog content/articles.  

In addition, dedicated digital programs drive to the vacation rental landing page on the Visit Greater Palm Springs website. Dedicated STVR advertising ran across Basis, Nativo, TripAdvisor, and Sojern, totaling 2.1M impressions from March through May.   

A VRBO Vacation Rental campaign ran for March, April, and May, had 452K impressions, and resulted in over 1,688 room nights and $10.3M in revenue.  

During the months of March, April, and May, television impressions amounted to 6.9B impressions over 581K spots. Television tactics included cable, connected television, and KTLA (Los Angeles). Television markets included our year-round and seasonal drive and fly markets (Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, New York, Dallas, Denver, Atlanta, Houston, Austin, Kansas City, St. Louis, Omaha, Washington DC, Boise, Eugene, Oakland, San Jose, and Salt Lake City.)  

In May, television creative switched to our updated summer :30 commercials, and partner co-op spots were launched. Our markets were also updated to reflect summer targeting, with the additional one-stop markets added for this year (New York, Minneapolis, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Austin).  

We thank our summer co-op partners for collaborating this season on a successful launch across television and connected TV platforms – Agua Caliente Casinos, Agua Caliente Cultural Plaza, BMW Performance Center West, City of Desert Hot Springs, City of Indian Wells, Fantasy Springs Resort Casino, Grand Hyatt Indian Wells Resort & Villas, JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa, Omni Rancho Las Palmas Resort & Spa, Palm Springs Preferred Small Hotels, Renaissance Esmeralda Indian Wells Resort & Spa, The Ritz-Carlton Rancho Mirage, Visit Palm Springs, and Westin Rancho Mirage Golf Resort & Spa.

For March, April, and May, total billboard impressions amounted to 82M.  

Events promoted during this timeframe included the BNP Paribas Open, Galleri Classic, La Quinta Art Celebration, Palm Desert Food & Wine, El Paseo Fashion Week, Cathedral City LGBT Days, Desert X, and Greater Palm Springs Restaurant Week.  

EXAMPLES OF BILLBOARDS FROM THIS REPORTING PERIOD ARE BELOW.

Greater Palm Springs meetings media continued in March, April, and May. Throughout the duration, the “Oasis is Real” campaign targeted meeting professionals with the overall goal of motivating group business bookings.  

Meetings advertising during this timeframe earned 6.7M impressions, including digital display and native advertising, content stories, social media, and e-blasts via Basis, AdTheorent, California Meetings & Events, Northstar Meetings Group, Small Market Meetings, Conference Direct, Meetings Today, USAE, Connect, Nativo, and Clicktivated.  

Greater Palm Springs’ international media plan targeting the UK/Ireland travelers continued to run digital and social media advertising from March through May, generating 8.8M impressions and over 85K clicks.   

International campaigns in partnership with Brand USA continued to run in the UK, Mexico, and France, with an additional program beginning in Germany in March/April. Planned Canadian efforts with Brand USA were paused with plans to re-engage for the next planned launch in the fall season.   

In response to current policies and the travel environment internationally, advertising efforts in Canada were paused in late February. Current efforts are targeted at consumers actively searching for trips to the US and Southern California specifically, ensuring that our welcoming destination is top of mind for travel decision-makers. We will continue to evaluate the current sentiment as well as evolve our messaging for international markets in the coming months to ensure effectiveness.    

EXAMPLES OF INTERNATIONAL MARKETING FROM THIS REPORTING PERIOD ARE BELOW.