Public Relations Measurement for Travel and Tourism

Measurement Strategy

How To Measure PR's Impact on Travel and Tourism
Your six-step passport to success.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

The good news about travel and tourism PR is that it is highly measurable. The bad news is that almost everyone does it wrong. The good news again is that we're going to show you how to do it the right way.

The Wrong Turn: AVEs Are a Dead End

The traditional way of measuring tourism PR has been to use Ad Value Equivalency: Count up the number of column inches generated by earned media and figure out what it would cost to advertise in the same publication. What you come up with is a dollar figure that tells you just about nothing useful, other than that you got some amount of ink somewhere.

(Regular Measurement Standard readers know that we frown on the use of AVEs. The very serious limitations of this technique are well documented. See this section of The Measurement Standard Blog Edition for a discussion and further references.)

On The Right Track: Measure Something That Will Get You Where You Want To Go

What you really need to know is how your travel and tourism ink impacts tourists and their spending: How did your PR efforts change sales and meals tax revenue? Butts in busses? Ticket sales? Heads in beds? Once you know how your efforts affect tourists' behavior, you can go on to decide how to adjust your efforts to further the overall goals of your program or department.

As the great guru of measurement Dr. James Grunig of the University of Maryland reminds us: "The main reason to measure objectives is not so much to reward or punish individual communications managers for success or failure as it is to learn from the research whether a program should be continued as is, revised, or dropped in favor of another approach."

The reality is that there are lots of very accurate ways to measure travel and tourism PR:

• Perhaps the most famous case is Southwest Airlines. By embedding a unique URL that takes visitors to a mirror landing page in each of their Search-Engine-Optimized press releases, they can tell exactly how many tickets they sell as a result of each press release they send out. See this Measurement Standard article for more.
• Elisa Camahort, co-founder of Blogger, uses a similar system to measure the impact of blogging on ticket sales for her clients in the theater world. She gets actors to blog about upcoming performances and then tracks the number of tickets sold by tracking the number of unique visits from the blog to the ticket sales page of their web site.
• The State of New Hampshire's Travel and Tourism Department has seen its budget grow every year, in a traditionally tight-fisted state, in part because it can show exactly how much impact its efforts have on the state's revenue. By looking at historic data on the total reach of its advertising efforts in a given quarter, and dividing that number by the number of visitors in the same quarter, it has established that for every 100 opportunities to see a positive message about the state, three people will visit. It also knows that each visitor, on average, spends $81.76 every day they are in the state. (A complete description of how the New Hampshire Department of Travel and Tourism calculates its ROI for marketing efforts will download from this link.)

What's It Worth To Be First In The Nation?

When the people at the New Hampshire Political Library wanted to calculate the value of New Hampshire's First-in-the-Nation Presidential Primary to the state, they started by adding up the direct spending of the various political campaigns and media outlets.

But that didn't account for the long term impact of the press that 4,000 visiting journalists generated for the state. A media analysis of some 5,000 articles revealed that approximately 10% of them were positive – leaving someone more likely to either visit the state or do business in the state. This translated into 22 million positive impressions.

Using the above NH Travel and Tourism formula, and using only those articles that left an out-of-state reader more likely to visit the state, they calculated that the press coverage was likely to generate an additional 660,000 visits and thus generate some $540 million in new tourism revenue.

Additionally, Ross Gittell, James R. Carter Professor and Professor of Management at the Whittemore School of Business at the University of New Hampshire, calculated that approximately 2% of all those visitors would be business owners or executives looking to start or expand a business in the state. That translated into some 13,200 executive visits. Assuming conservatively that just 1% of those executives started or expanded a business in the state, the media exposure would have yielded 132 new businesses. Since the average business in New Hampshire employs 20 people, media coverage would have generated 2,640 new jobs.

Although New Hampshire doesn't subsidize new business, on average, states spend about $10,000 per job created – meaning that the media exposure from one primary had a business development potential worth $26.4 million.

(A complete description of how the New Hampshire Department of Travel and Tourism calculates its ROI for marketing efforts will download from this link.)

In addition to these financial calculations, the NH Travel and Tourism people also keep a close eye on website visits and click-throughs, calculating an average click-through rate for all promotions as well as a cost-per-click-through calculation that enables the department to calculate which promotional efforts are most efficient at generating click throughs. This allows them to better plan future promotional efforts.

Once again, numbers like cost-per-click-through and revenue should not be used to simply justify the existence of a media relations department. The real value of all this measurement is to better understand how specific tactics and strategies impact the overall goals of your tourism efforts.