An assessment of Topeka’s tourism and travel industry last week from a national consultant is expected to help Visit Topeka create a roadmap for tackling challenges in marketing the city as a destination.
Brett Oetting, president and CEO of Visit Topeka Inc., said he was hopeful information supplied by Destination NEXT will identify challenges and positives as Momentum 2022 kicks off.
The Momentum plan, which will be implemented Jan. 1, 2018, tackles economic development, but the plan presented last week by Paul Ouimet, managing director of Destination NEXT, shared research and information specific to destination organizations like Visit Topeka and area hotels and conference centers.
“Within the Momentum plan, there is a lot about quality of life and quality of place,” Oetting said. “This really goes hand in hand. If the Destination NEXT recommendation is going to be that we need to have more nightlife, or we need to try to bolster our museums, that really helps with quality of life.”
Ouimet spoke for almost two hours to Topeka area destination professionals, sharing his passion for the vision of DestinationNext: “To provide destination organizations with a powerful assessment tool and practical actions and strategies for sustainable success in a dramatically changing world.”
He also shared five areas where the consulting company’s survey determined Topeka is under-performing: convention and meeting facilities; sports and recreation; brand; communication and internet; and air access.
“Convention and meeting facilities — these were some of the lowest scores I’ve seen so far,” Ouimet said. “You’ve got good off-site venues, but your current convention center capacity and long-term capacity, these are really low scores.”
Amateur sporting facilities “are not too bad,” Ouimet said, but the city doesn’t have opportunities for major sporting events.
Brand is a challenge for many communities. In Topeka, survey respondents mentioned several issues, including a failure to use social media to leverage a city brand.
Digging more deeply into the categories, Ouimet highlighted low scores on public transportation and walkability and public Wi-fi.
“These are major issues for destinations, and you’re not alone in this,” he said. “But having walkability, public transportation, outdoor recreational public Wi-Fi — if you’re going to have any shot at capitalizing on the growing Millennial market, you’ve got to figure those things out. This is a major, major challenge for a lot of destinations. A lot of Millennials don’t even have cars. This is a reality today that we really have to deal with.”
Europe and Asia have strong public Wi-Fi , Ouimet said, but North America has yet to figure it out.
Ouimet spent the first part of his presentation discussing trends for the destination industry based on a recently updated survey. It was notable, he said, that in the three years between surveys, there were significant changes.
”What was interesting is three years ago, all of the talk at that time was dealing with two major trends – the integration of smart technology combined with social media, and the implications of that on the marketplace,” he said. “Most of you are going to say that’s not that big of a deal today. But three to five years ago, most of us in this industry, hoteliers, destination marketing organizations, the hot topic at that time was search engine optimization. We were all trying to build the perfect sort of websites and increase Google searches. This market has changed very, very quickly. It’s continuing to accelerate.”
The updated study found new elements, like the critical emergence of peer-to-peer review of destinations.
“It’s no longer about organizations like Visit Topeka and the chamber of commerce telling the story about how great your city is,” Ouimet said. “It’s about creating digital platforms where your guests, your visitors are telling the story of you.”
In working with Trip Advisor, he found that 62 percent of hotel guests research the destination and hotel properties ahead of time.
“That number is even higher for attractions. I keep telling people in different cities, what happens if you as a hotel or an attraction or a venue have a couple of bad months and you start to see a decline in your ratings?” he said. “This is worth millions of dollars of potential loss. This is a very, very significant new reality for people that has just taken off in the last three to five years.”
The new future study found that of the top 25 trends predicted by participants from around the world, 12 of them were “not even on our radar three years ago.”
“Ten of the strategies that we’ve come up with were not on our radar screen three years ago,” he said. “This shows you the pace of change.”
Ouimet identified three critical themes of the new study:
- Personalized, unique and authentic experiences
- Less sales, more strategic partnerships
- Sustainable tourism
The first one is what visitors today are looking for, he said.
“They are looking for things that are cool, hip, unique for that destination,” Ouimet said. “They’re not looking for fabricated stuff. They’ve been to Vegas. They want unique opportunities to take a selfie of something that is different. The other thing is, they’re not looking for static attractions either. They’re looking for experiences. Tourism today is about the door-to-door experience.”