Stay at a hotel, get a voucher for a restaurant; buy tickets to a sporting event, get 20 percent off your car rental. Bundling services is a way many visitor-reliant businesses are attracting travelers to their community.
Shawn Stinson, director of communications for the Salt Lake Convention & Visitors Bureau explained that large associations are required by their bylaws to hold a convention every year and in a different city. To accommodate all their members, they like to bounce around the nation to different regions.
Also because of the economy, many groups and corporations are trying to book now at discounted rates for several years in advance.
“They’re proactive in this time of cities ‘on sale,'” he said.
So the cities of Baltimore, Md. and Fort Worth, Texas formed a sales partnership. You sign multi-year contracts with both, you get a better deal. Because of similarities in size, lodging and convention services, Salt Lake City was recently included in the partnership.
“In this partnership, they can get a larger room block in all three cities,” he explained. “If one lands a big client, we can get them too.”
Now associations and companies can travel to the East Coast, Midwest and Mountain West and be guaranteed everything their meeting needs in all three locales, Stinson explained.
An additional perk to the partnership is any city can recommend the other two if its convention and visitor’s bureau is answering questions and realizes it isn’t the best fit for a potential client’s needs.
presenting all three cities as a package, they can attract major clients who have big economic impacts on the communities. For example, Park City’s Utah Olympic Park is a popular off-site attraction for groups meeting in the valley, Stinson said.
Park City Chamber/Bureau head Bill Malone said it’s an interesting strategy, but he’s never seen it tried with smaller resort communities.
“I believe our concern (as Park City) is that we do not sell to the larger conventions (like Salt Lake City does) which may rotate meetings on an annual basis,” Malone explained. “The specs for their convention centers may match up well with each other size-wise as well as geographically.”