Stay Park City is currently running a promotion in collaboration with Park City-based Ski Butlers. It’s local on local, and their visitors are loving it. After all, what are you doing in Park City if you’re not skiing at their world-class resorts? Stay Park City knows their audience and, using Ripe’s software and reservation team, is offering an exclusive discount and unmatchable convenience through Ski Butlers’ rental delivery service.
Your DMO can do this too. Are you taking advantage of the power of value-adds? It’s no secret that consumers like a deal. But you know what they love? A relevant deal. Take a look at how your DMO can utilize value-adds to incentivize bookings.
Value-adds
Let’s start with defining a value-add. For our purposes, a value-add is any offer with perceived value to the consumer. Note that it does not have to be of monetary value (but it certainly can be!). Your DMO can also offer value through other means like exclusivity, utility, emotion, or a combination of all of these. Keep in mind that a value-add can make all the difference when a traveler is trying to decide whether to book on your site. So be creative in your presentation of your value-adds to best communicate how it benefits your travelers.
Knowing Your Audience
For the best value-adds, you need a strong understanding of your travelers’ needs, particularly relative to your destination. That is where you’re the expert. Why are your travelers visiting your destination? What draws them there? What issues do they commonly face? And don’t forget about your local partners. They can be a great source of information when answering these questions and by also taking your partners’ needs into account, you can concoct the perfect local value-adds that benefit everyone. When in doubt, we recommend travel-related and local deals to increase desirability and booking.
Where does Ripe Come In?
It’s all up to your organization how hands-on you’d like to be in the setup process and how much support you’d like from Ripe. We’ll work with your DMO to build out custom branded display, copy, and bundling for your travelers. Our Client Success Team can be a resource to help your DMO best market promotions and increase bookings. The support doesn’t stop there, though. We also have a Reservations Team that can manage value-add fulfillment and traveler-facing communication if your organization needs it. If you’re looking for ease of use for your travelers, we recommend our Ripe x Bandwango integration. Bandwango is a leader in digital passport redemption for local experiences and, like Ripe, offers your DMO pertinent first-party data to create informed, curated value-adds for your consumers.
Stay Park City x Ski Butlers
Stay Park City’s Ski Butlers promotion offers bookers a discount on the best ski delivery services in the city. We think it’s great for a few reasons:
1) It’s relevant. Boasting “The Greatest Snow on Earth,” Park City visitors are going there to ski.*
2) It’s exclusive. Stay Park City has partnered with Ski Butlers for this discount and consumers are not going to find it on other OTA sites. It entices them to book on the Stay Park City site.
3) It’s of value. This particular value-add does a great job of combining exclusivity, convenience, and monetary value to the traveler. You could also argue there is emotional value – they are tapping into the excitement of skiing in Park City and the preemptive relief of not having to deal with the headache of rentals.
4) It creates local revenue. Ski Butlers is based in Park City. Travelers will be booking locally, skiing locally, and spending locally. And Stay Park City is doing its job of driving economic impact for their partners and the destination.
*If you are strictly an après-skier who loves Park City, don’t worry. Stay Park City has taken this into account and has other value-adds too.
Value-adds are one of the most straightforward ways to incentivize bookings on your site. If you’re already a client, make sure you talk to your CSM to get your value-adds up and running. If you’re a DMO interested in Ripe’s white-label booking solutions, book a demo with us to learn about a better way to connect your lodging partners to your marketing efforts.
