Integrated Marketing Strategy

Brennen interviews Allyson Carpenter, an industry veteran with experience at Brand USA, Virgin Australia, Qantas, and more. Allyson shares insights on driving traffic and visitors to destinations, focusing on data, creativity, and actionable strategies. This episode is packed with valuable lessons for travel marketers looking to elevate their game. 

What is The Travel Marketing Podcast?

You’re a marketer in one of the most competitive industries.

You may be tired of trying, over and over, to use the same marketing strategies that you read about online or learned about in school - but is that really going to move the needle?

We all know the big brands - Booking.com, American Airlines, The Points Guy, Royal Caribbean, Marriott, VRBO, and Hertz... but what about the emerging brands that have found their path to scale?

The Travel Marketing Podcast is about sitting down with successful marketing professionals in the travel, transportation, and tourism industry to learn what has worked for them, what they’ve learned along the way, and what new trends they’re noticing.

We are Propellic, and we’re on a mission to create more diversity in thought for the planet. We’re doing that by helping brands - specifically travel, transportation, and tourism brands - increase their reach through intelligent marketing that travels further.

This is the Travel Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Propellic, bringing you the news and insights and what's working and not working in today's competitive transportation and tourism landscape. From emerging brands to the most established professionals, these lessons of intelligent marketing will help your marketing plan travel further.

Hello, everybody. Brennan Bliss here, CEO of Propellic. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Travel Marketing Podcast. I am super excited to interview with Allyson Carpenter, who's got decades of experience in travel marketing, starting at Disneyland, going all the way through Travels Corp and TTC and Virgin Australia, Air New Zealand, Brand USA, she went to MMGY for a little while, and then Qantas. And now she started her own consulting firm, Carpenter Global Marketing. Today's conversation, which I just finished up, was a really incredible opportunity to learn about how to drive traffic and how to drive visitors to a destination as a private company.

It's a really, really interesting topic and conversation to have such a big, big calling. In Allyson's case, she has done campaigns from driving people to travel from the U.S. all the way to New Zealand and vice versa.
Today the conversation really rounded out well talking about U.S. travel and driving travelers to destinations within the U.S. so I'm really excited to get started with Allyson.
She has a focus on translating data, she has a lot of creative vision and she's a lot of actionable strategies that she dives into in this and a couple of mistakes that I think marketers will, uh, will be happy to hear and avoid going forward.
So without further ado, we'll dive right in.

All right, Allyson, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm super excited to dive in.

Thanks for having me.

I think one of the most fascinating things about what I get to do is just sit and talk to marketers who have been there and done that to help our listeners level up their travel marketing skills and obviously you've got substantial experience in travel marketing. So I thought, what a great opportunity to just dive right in.
So I want to start with airlines, one of the first things that people purchase when traveling, if not the first thing people purchase when traveling in their research journey, you were in airline marketing for a while.

So how did you learn people research and buy airline tickets?

That is a great question, Brennen, and I probably could spend a lot of time talking about this and all the hacks that people see out there and within an episode itself, actually. But to be focused on really that path to purchase outside of hacks, I think what most people are looking for are the best fare, not necessarily the best value.

And that becomes really tricky for airlines because that means people are treating airlines like a basic commodity, maybe something like laundry detergent or facial tissue. So it's really hard for airlines then to distinguish themselves on anything but price when. Someone is focused on price.

And with that being said, most people are using OTAs and metasites like Google flights and kayak to research as well as that airline website. And there was recently a research released by Expedia. It's called the path of purchase. I don't know if you've seen it, if you haven't.

It’s a 2023 research, right? The 71 days…

Yes.

Okay. Very cool.

Yes. You know, what was really interesting to me as someone who's worked in airlines and it does align with my experience as well as. They cite that people spend 160 minutes on OTAs. So over two and a half hours on an OTA, they spend over two hours on an airline website and nearly two hours on that travel metasite.

So people are doing a lot of price comparing and shopping around to find what they feel is the best deal, not necessarily the best value.

Yeah, I think that's interesting. There was a Phocuswright report that came out. I can't remember what the name of it was, but it was announced at the Phocuswright conference in Europe a couple weeks ago.
And basically it was people research and research and research. And they make their decision based on price, irrespective of what category or what class of the market they're in, whether they're ultra luxury, I mean, they're going to choose based on price of the first class 12,000 ticket, which I find to be interesting, or the basic economy, 120 ticket.

I recently made that mistake, Allyson. I booked a trip on Iceland air. And it was like 1,800 for my husband and me to go from, what was it? New York to Iceland and then back to Boston. And then I needed to change it to be Charles de Gaulle to Iceland to Boston, which is a shorter flight. Less expensive flight.

I called and tried to make the change and it was 3,000 to make the change. And it was a less expensive flight. Um, very much know the difference in choosing a low cost carrier versus a normal carrier.

Right. Well, it's not just low cost versus legacy, but there's so many fair rules. and so there's a given fair that a lot of people don't consider.

And as the average consumer, people aren't reading that. And there's a lot of devil in the details you could say. Right?

Yeah.

And so one of the things that's great is even though people are looking on OTAs and meta sites and the airline website, they're still a very, large and active travel agent community that can really help smooth over experiences like that.
Very valuable community.

Yeah, that's our favorite travel advisors, right? The people who actually understand how to read a fair, fair conditions and rules. Cause I consider, I fly probably 80 to a hundred times a year. I've taken 14 flights this month of June already or June ended yesterday. So did 14 flights and I consider myself somewhat sophisticated airline buyer cause I do it so frequently, but even so I've made that mistake.

So moving on just to learn a little bit more about your experience. You're obviously you're at Air New Zealand, brand USA, MMGY, Qantas, you've done a lot and I'm curious what you think your most successful ad campaign was at any of those companies.

That's a great question. I've been thinking about this one quite a bit and I think it really depends on a particular set of goals that you have.
And so I've decided to go with an example where it's something I had to think short term and long term to really build the success of a particular market. So in one of my recent roles, I had to develop an aviation attraction funds campaign with a destination, New South Wales, and this is for Canada. So this particular airline before the pandemic, they flew to Canada six weeks out of the year wasn't really a focus for them when they came back from the pandemic. The flight was then three times a week year round. And so a lot of effort had to go into building that market up to be able for that route to be sustainable at that rate. So with this aviation attraction funds that were provided by the government of New South Wales, which is a great thing to have, especially with recovery of airlines at the time, I came up with a plan where I needed to invest in research. I needed to understand what was going on specifically in that market that maybe needed to be tweaked from my other plans that I used for the U.S. I needed to come up with creatives that really focused on that particular consumer and put them as the hero in the story.

And I needed to engage travel trade and make sure that I was educating them and building relationships with them. Cause again, this wasn't a focus prior to the pandemic. So all in all, this campaign achieves 81 percent year over year growth in this market, and it really set that foundation for long term awareness and bookings because, as you know, going on a long haul flight, especially to some place like Australia, New Zealand, that typically has a longer tail of purchase time, right?

Yeah, for sure. So that was, what was the source country again that you mentioned for that flight?

So this was for Canada.

Okay. Got it. What was the route?

It was from Vancouver to Sydney specifically.

And then this was Air New Zealand specifically at the time, right?

Uh, this is for Qantas.

For Qantas. Okay. Got it. So yeah, with Qantas, were you advertising that like to the spokes of the hub that was coming out of Canada or was it just in the source destination? At the source location of the travelers that you're marketing to?

Yeah, absolutely. Great question. For any international airline, especially in a destination like Australia, where it's often viewed as a once in a lifetime kind of trip, to be able to make that route successful, you have to advertise to the feeder market.

So while maybe the biggest source is Vancouver proximity, right? Definitely Toronto is the largest. So you have to market to Toronto, Montreal.

Oh my God. Going to Vancouver. How long is the flight from Vancouver to Australia and New Zealand?

From Vancouver to Sydney. You're looking at about 15 or 16 hours, I believe. From LA…

That is a long flight. My goodness, so 80 something percent growth you said year over year on that campaign, right?

Yeah.

Very cool. So other side of the coin, have you had any significant failures, things to watch out for that you think marketers should be aware about?

Yes. You know, sometimes you really need to understand your product and where it sits within the minds of the consumer, right? So similarly, I was working for a different airline. I was working on another aviation campaign, and this was based on marketing that comes when you develop a new route. And I had seen a lot of success with other routes using a credit cards offers partner. And it was one way that I could offer this at a reduced rate and not have it come matched immediately by my competitors, which happens in airlines.

So I was focused on this particular route, but the challenge was that while it was successful for the airline and driving overall bookings, it didn't drive the bookings on the routes that I needed.

So do you get credit for that at least?

Well, yes. I mean, the company says, yes, this was a successful campaign, but if you're working in partnership, With someone who's provided you money and there's an expectation of focusing on a specific route.

Yeah.

Obviously a bit challenging, right?

The tourism development money that gets spent by the private company and ends up driving tourism to different destinations. I find that that's fun, not ideal for them, but at least, hey, you drove top line for your organization, right?

Right. And I did. So in reviewing this really, it was understanding where this sits in the consumer's mind that there was going to be a need for more inspiration, education, and persuasion to get people to go to this particular destination.

And so in subsequent campaigns, I changed the consumer media channels. I worked really closely with trade and I combined messaging with a more popular destination. And that was able to kind of take the heavy lifting if you will. And that was much more influential in increasing passengers on the specified route.

Yeah, I can imagine. Wow. And then using that campaign, I imagine it was multi-channel, right? Not just using one, one media type.

Correct.

So with that, I mean, even not just that campaign, but across all of the campaigns that you've run, all the types of campaigns you've run in aviation marketing, what have you found to be the lowest customer acquisition cost channels? Is it meta search? Is it paid media, paid ads on Google?

Oh, that's a great question. I think it depends again on your goals and what you're trying to acquire people for. So many travel brands, depending on your brand and your location, it's really challenging to create customer loyalty, right? Because. So many people are thinking of you as a one time purchase.

So you're constantly in this acquisition process, right? So for me, I try to focus more on email database development and social media. Cause I feel for the products that I've marketed, that's typically where I can get the most impact for the smallest cost. And with an airline, it's a bit easy in the sense of everybody wants free flights, right?

So partnering with another entity that has an audience that has enough psycho demographics and so forth that match what you're looking for, but probably there's not a lot of overlap with your current audience. That's golden. Couple of tickets, run a sweeps, a contest, get all the database entries. Now you've just built up your email marketing list that you can have over and over again.

And that first person data, which is super important these days.

You know, with airlines, I know we didn't really talk about this much in our pre-interview, but I mean, like loyalty is such an important piece of the puzzle, the loyalty program, because you're talking about one time purchase versus acquiring a customer for the lifetime.
How frequently do most people take flights? Is it like twice a year or two, two trips typically?

Yeah, I would say most people are taking flights probably two, three times a year. I think you and I are probably a little bit way above that. So just a little, you know, trying to not skew the numbers, but yeah, I would say two to three times and that's mostly domestic flights, right?

So domestic proposition and loyalty is much different than when you're trying to create that for an international carrier from another country, right? Because people are going to go to Australia once, New Zealand once, in most cases.

Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense. Think about, you know, flying, I flew, I think Etihad to Abu Dhabi on the way to my honeymoon in Asia.

And I didn't care about building loyalty with them because I knew it was, I'm not going to fly them anytime soon. That's, I guess there's the loyalty partnerships, the airline partnerships and one world and star alliance. It'll allow you to acquire points on one airline and sky team and have it be, uh, transferred to the other airline.
But speaking of travel, you said you travel a lot. I'm curious. It's interesting in the travel industry, there's travel tech conferences, there's travel, like hotel conferences, there's industry specific, like short term rental conferences. There's not really a conference for travel marketing and marketers.
I know that you recently went to IPW I saw on your LinkedIn. I was curious if you could tell our listeners a little bit more about your experience there and whether or not you think that's a valuable conference here in the US for travel marketers to attend.

Yeah, absolutely. So, IPW is the largest US tourism only trade show and it's a business to business meetings format with about 6,000 delegates, both domestic and international. So most of the attendees there, they're going to be destinations or really large travel brands that are located in the U.S. And there's also some marketing service providers, attraction and activity providers.
It is great if that is the focus of what you're trying to do. If you're trying to meet people and grow your business as far as maybe you want to partner with a destination, you want to figure out how that works, maybe you want to work with a hotel year. Great, awesome selection for that. It's quite entertaining.
There are a lot of events for networking and usually it's a destination that's showcased in a really fantastic way. So you get to experience the place as well. The challenge is if you're looking for something that's more thought leadership towards travel, marketing, skills development, it's not going to be the best conference for that.
If you're looking for something more in that area. You probably would be better attending eTourism Summit, which was this past April in Vegas.

Were you there?

I wasn't. I haven't been to that one, but I've heard great things about it.

I was there this last year. It's very heavy on DMOs, like very DMO heavy.

Very DMO heavy. Interesting. There's also state and regional conferences so pretty much each state has a governor's conference on tourism. Again, there's going to be a lot of DMOs there, but there's a lot of attractions and things there as well. And there'll be service providers attending as well. So it's a great place for networking.
They usually have both educational and business to business type meetings. So you get that a bit more balanced. And another favorite, which really isn't tourism specific, but the American Marketing Association holds a lot of events, both within a given region or location, but they do have a lot of stuff online that is free.
And so it's a great way to upskill.

I want to create a course for tourism marketers because there's not a single source of that information. You mentioned. Thank you. I'm curious, and I'm throwing another one out there. No, that's all right. You talked about the path to purchase, right? That's an incredibly helpful tool and piece of research that Expedia created.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they generate a lot of their business through resellers. So, it helps advise and teach the resellers how to better market to travelers based on understanding their path to purchase. Are there any other resources that you've used that are not just conferences, but where would you learn and up level your skills?
Whether it's just tourism marketing or marketing as a whole, you mentioned the AMA, you mentioned a couple of those conferences, but what about non conference?

Yeah, non conference. AMA is probably my first pick just because they're kind of the standard industry stuff so it's always great to see what's going along in other industries and how it might be applicable.
I tend to look at a lot of research, so besides this study with Expedia about the path to purchase, which is super interesting if you haven't seen it, there's a lot of great research out there. So Grand USA does a ton of research about people traveling into the United States and that's similar with other international destination brands.
So for example, if you were a tour operator in Australia and you were trying to get Americans to come to Australia to see your tours, then Tourism Australia would have a lot of research. Those are great meaty things because depending on the destination and, and the person, the consumer, their motivations can change from trip to trip, right?
So, what might work to attract people to go, I don't know, Americans or Canadians to the Caribbean for sun, because it's winter. That's not going to work the same way as, uh, to Europe or somebody going to Australia, right? Or even further down, you might have individuals that the motivation is family and friends, but it's really spurred by travel abroad, right?
So you kind of need to know who you're looking at and the motivations of why they travel and that gives the form of your marketing strategy.

Yeah, that's interesting because you were talking a little bit about BrandUSA's studies on driving travelers to the U. S., people inbound U.S. travelers, I guess, what did you learn about when people travel to the U.S., which a lot of the people that listen to this, I would say, are going to be people traveling within the U. S., which I know BrandUSA mostly targets international audience, right?

Correct. Because that's how they were formed. There's legislation that stipulates that.

Yeah. Okay. So when brand USA is trying to attract international international travelers or a company is trying to market to international travelers, what is the purchase behavioral and behavior look like on those?
I mean, whether it's someone traveling from India, someone traveling from Japan, someone traveling from the UK. What does the path to purchase look like when someone's considering the U.S.? It's such a big destination.

It is a humongous destination. Again, it comes down to the market and the motivators. So as an example, if you were marketing to somebody, let's say in South America, oftentimes they're looking for shopping destinations.
So that is a motivator of theirs. So if you are near one, or that's part of what you do, that might be a good market for you. There's a lot of difference between how these different markets look at the U.S. and the thing about Brand USA's research is you can go to their website and they have it listed per market.
So a great resource again, for anybody who's looking to get into a new market and might want to see what some of those characteristics are, but they will do studies about what are the motivators for the U.S. how they think about the U.S. what kind of characteristics is it friendly? Is it political? That sort of thing.
They will have information about the party size. How long it is between, you know, when they first start thinking about a trip and when they actually book. So you've got that path to purchase information. That's a very meaty question. Depending on whatever market you're dealing with, it can quite vary.

It's a broad one. It really just depends, I guess, is the answer.

Yeah. Yes. And that's the thing. You can't use the same strategy against every market, right? Cause they are different. There's some that tend to be more travel agent heavy than others. There's some that tend to book closer in than others, right?
So you really have to do your research when you're thinking about marketing strategy and international, and you need to think about if you're ready to, is your business ready to welcome that source market, right? So one of the things that Brand USA does is they have readiness program so if you need to learn how to be a welcoming destination for a particular type of traveler from another country, they can help you with that process so that you are meeting their needs.

Yeah, that is a beast. Just putting it in context, like international travel to the U.S. That is like, wait, let's, what, five words, international travel to the, yeah, something like that. Five words that describe something that is like 30 years of doing that is not enough to understand the whole scope of that.
There's so many destinations here in so many source markets. I would imagine the U.S. is one of the hardest, you know, getting someone to not go to New York, right? Like getting someone to come see like Utah, the mountains of Utah. That's something that other countries might not know about, but that's one of the most beautiful places within the States.

Absolutely. It is definitely a massive task to be promoting all 50 states and the five territories, District of Columbia, and then it's two through and beyond the gateways. So most people are going to know about New York, LA, San Francisco, Vegas, I'm just randomly picking four.

Yeah, it's amazing how much Vegas is, that's something I've learned over the past couple years is how popular a destination Vegas is for international tourism.

Yes, it's gotten really popular in the last couple years. I saw a report just recently about how much it's improved year over year. So they're getting a lot of people from India. In the past, they had a lot of travelers from China that would come in. They had a lot of shopping and high rollers actually from China.
So yeah, it's a really interesting market to be in. Um, kind of going back to your point about Utah, so In my role when I was at Brand New USA, Utah was one of my partners and I worked very closely with the state and a lot of the destinations within that state to help promote them. And that is one of the challenges is to get people to think beyond those gateways, but it's also to think about those beautiful, amazing places in a way that they can experience authentically without damaging that ecosystem, right?
So Utah, along with some of my other partners at the time, they were really focused on the Chinese market. And so they did a series called How Do You Utah with this influencer that we worked with at Brand USA who's American, but she speaks fluently and has a lot of personality and so she would talk about this is how you go on the path that you need to bring your water, that you need to be covered, you know, take your trash, all of those messaging points that we'd want because I think that's some of the challenge that we have as destinations is oftentimes we're trying to educate people who in their country behavior may be different.

And so knowing that we want to be sharing these things for other generations to come, we have to come up with ways of educating them.

Yeah, a hundred percent. What an interesting topic. This is more like more destination focused than we typically get. And it's such a interesting, like to think about driving demand for a destination versus for attracting a specific private business that there's so many different stakeholders involved there's the county, the city, the state, the country, the airlines that are associated with the hotels that are associated with just a tangled mess of bureaucracy, but also significant impact if you do it right.

Absolutely. And the thing when you're marketing an airline or a business that is a bit further down the funnel, right?
Someone has to choose the destination first. So you have to win in the destination. Even if you're an airline or some other business, if those people aren't choosing a destination of which you operate in, they can't be one of your customers, right?
So effectively you're doing a bit of destination marketing as well, even if you don't think of it that way, because you got to convince them to go to where you operate.

Yeah, a hundred percent. We could talk about this for hours. I'm going to pivot a little bit, do a non sequitur mostly because I went out of order, but we won't tell people that.

That's okay.

People pretend they didn't hear that. Right? So the last real question I've got, not ending on a negative note, there's another one after this, that's a positive one, but what has kept you historically from hitting booking targets?

That's a great question. When I was thinking about this, I really felt that it fell into two main categories, one being the competitive landscape, whether that's the destination, kind of what I was just chatting about, or if it's the airline. And then the other one is going to be the value of, and I'm going to use the US dollar, but it would be whatever the local currency is relative to the destination and that currency.

So first you have to win on the destination. If individuals aren't even, if they're not even aware that you operate in wherever place.

Sure.

Right? So that's the big thing. And so for Americans, oftentimes when they think about long haul travel, they're thinking about Europe and it's. It's based in our historical connection to the continent and, you know, people tend to go to Europe multiple times.

And so like, I love Europe.

We do. We do. It's just part of who we are, I guess. And so you need to build familiarity with your destination.

Well, it's funny how little, like, close people are to like traveling to South Central America, which has some beautiful and very safe destinations. Whereas like, I will argue that half the places in South and Central America are safer than Rome, Italy.
Not more than that, because I think that is the primary objection to traveling is South and Central America. A lot of people talk about safety, but I mean, it's a big city, right? It's city based. You can find, say, like Costa Rica, for instance, is a destination, one of the safest destinations in
the world and absolutely beautiful, but Americans love their Europe, don't they?

They do. And, you know, my viewpoint on a lot of this is obviously, there are people in this world that do things that cause others harm. And unfortunately, it's just part of our experience living in this world that you need to look beyond that as an individual, as a traveler, and look for things that inspire you and not things that detract you.

And if you look through the lens of safety and safety is important. Don't get me wrong, but if that is your main filtering thing, and you think of all the places that you're familiar with because of, you know, like you use the example of Rome, I love Rome, but let's just go there for a moment. If you're focusing on the places that you know, and you don't search beyond, you're really missing out on really unique, beautiful destinations, lively cultures, just people that really make such an amazing impact on your worldview and your experience. So to your point, it's about familiarity, but you need to look beyond that. You need to question some of the things that you're seeing about a destination.

And that's, it's our mission as an organization to propel like it's increased diversity of thought in the world. It's like Thomas and I, my husband and I, we got engaged in Piedmont, not in Tuscany. It's like, go see a place that not everybody goes to, right? Go see a destination that is. less heavily traveled, even though it's, you know, built for tourism still, and you'd get a more diverse worldview. It's a really special thing.
It's very cool. So where are you traveling next, Allyson?

Oh, that's the million dollar question. I'm going to admit currently I don't have a solidified plan, but I have lots of ideas of where I would like to go. If I'm going to default to our favorite continent, I think if things work out, I would love to go. I've been to Amsterdam, but beyond Amsterdam, there is a redhead for people who are seeing my photo later realize that I have red hair.
So there's a redhead convention gathering in Tilburg and they get thousands of people from around the world. And I thought it would be like a really cool experience because, we're only 2 percent of the population. It's kind of random, but besides that, I probably will find myself in the South of France this year.
I have a dear lifelong friend that is taking a sabbatical there. So I'll probably end up there. And as far as non Europe, I would probably be looking to Central or South America. I've been to several countries there. I think this trip, I probably would be looking at say Guatemala or maybe down into Peru, I haven't made it to Peru yet.

Incredible. Yeah. I need to get down past Costa Rica, not had the opportunity to do that yet, but I really appreciate you joining me today. What a great viewpoint, a position of working, trying to drive, not for traveling, but travel. To a specific destination.
Thank you so much, Allyson, for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Oh, thanks for having me, Brennen. It's been great.

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