Boost local tourism (and your occupancy) by being truly local

When you’re running an accommodation business, you can vastly improve your occupancy rates if you can bring more tourists to your local area. Having in-depth local knowledge is vital, as you can use the attractions and events in your area within your own marketing activities. After all, visitors are only going to stay at your property if they know what’s going on in the vicinity.

Here we take a look at some innovative ideas to promote tourism and help you to understand the advantages of social media in tourism, to bring guests flocking to your area.

Tourism promotion ideas

Learning how to promote a tourist destination is an essential part of life for every accommodation business owner. You might be lucky enough to own a property in a popular area that already receives a lot of tourism. However, if your region is a little less well-known, you need to be able to provide the essential knowledge that will entice tourists to visit.

Here are some essential tourism promotion ideas to take advantage of.

1. Get in-depth knowledge of local attractions

If you haven’t done so already, you need to visit all the local attractions, sights and recreational facilities to gain an in-depth knowledge of exactly what they’re all about and what they offer. This way, you can provide first-hand knowledge to your guests about each attraction, including:

• How to get there
• How long it takes
• Anything they need to bring with them
• Any other essential information.

This will be highly useful for visitors who don’t know the area well.

If there is a local tour operator in your area, you might be able to take a “familiarisation” tour at no cost in return for promoting the tour company at your property. You might even receive a commission if any of your guests book tours with the company.

2. Be an authority on places to eat and drink

All travellers, whether for leisure or business, need places to eat and drink. Many of them won’t know the local area, so they will be relying on you for recommendations. Because of this, you need to have a thorough knowledge of the dining facilities located close to your property.

Try out all the local clubs, restaurants and cafés, and forge friendships with the owners and staff. This way, you can recommend places to eat and drink with authority. It’s always great for travellers to hear, “Go to Harry’s café, and tell him I sent you.”

3. Stay up-to-date with local events

Knowing about local events is a useful strategy for two reasons:

• You can keep your guests informed about what’s happening locally during their stay.
• You can tie in your own marketing with local events.

(For example, we know of a small guest house that is located close to a concert venue. The guest house promotes the concerts in its own online marketing. This helps the guest house to become more visible in online search results, as it comes up when people are searching for information about the concerts.

4. Stay social

Knowing how to promote tourism through social media is key to the continued success of your accommodation business. For this reason, you need an effective social media event marketing strategy. If you promote local events and attractions on your own social media pages, you will encourage visitors to your region and your accommodation property.

Here are some tips to get you started with finding out how to promote an event on social media:

• Make sure you follow local attractions, events organisers, and specific events pages on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
• Share their content on your own social media pages.
• Include hashtags for local events and attractions in your social media marketing.
• Many businesses are now using social media at events – if you can find any footage or photographs from local events, share them with the relevant credits and hashtags to drive more traffic to your own site.

Find out more about how to promote tourism

If you are an accommodation business owner looking for help and advice on making your business more profitable, or you have a small accommodation business that you are thinking of selling, Accommodation Business Brokers are here to help. Please contact our team for more information and advice.