Face The State Staff Report
A report released by the State Auditors Office (PDF) criticizes the Colorado Tourism Office for not setting more measurable goals for managing its budget, which includes $10.5 million annually for domestic advertising. The audit suggested the tourism office should "clearly stipulate its expectations" and "increase efforts to include outcome measures in contracts."
HotDealsColorado.comColorado Tourism Office
The audit is released as the CTO pursues a summer advertising campaign to draw visitors to the state via a new Web site, HotDealsColorado.com. Launched April 27, the tourism office does not have a mechanism for measuring how many tourists book travel deals presented on the site. "It is hard to track exactly how [people] booked the deal because they do it on somebody else's site," said Kim McNulty, director of the CTO. "It is essentially a referral Web site to the lodging property or restaurant that is offering the deal."
The promotion has a total budget of $500,000, which includes radio and other advertising in other states to draw visitors to the site. According to McNulty, the site had received about 104,000 page views as of May 20. Over roughly the same period, 2,800 offers were printed, 1,900 were saved and 259 were forwarded on to friends or family via e-mail. "The fact that we have so many people saving the deals and printing them out is some indication that people are interested in taking advantage of that deal,"McNulty said.
Donald Lichtenstein, a marketing professor at the University of Colorado, said the $500,000 budget is “nothing to sneeze at,” but gauging the promotion’s effectiveness is a difficult task. “A necessary condition for a promotion to have any effect at all is for people to attend it,” he said. “I had not seen [HotDealsColorado.com] before or even heard of it.”
Consumers do not actually purchase vacation deals through HotDealsColorado.com, but are redirected to individual businesses' Web sites to make reservations directly. McNulty said the CTO is pushing the site in-state as well as in targeted markets like Chicago, California and Houston.
The Web site currently features around 400 deals to consumers at no cost to the participating businesses. “The site offers the opportunity for even the smaller businesses, like bed and breakfasts or the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo can post deals they’re offering to consumers,”McNulty said. “Those are not found on major travel aggregator sites.”
Lichtenstein said there is always a risk companies could be cannibalizing their own sales by offering deals to people who would have paid full price to travel in Colorado regardless. “Companies use different promotional means all the time, but the question is whether they are hitting different market segments,” he said. “It could be the case that the Web site is redundant and there is already maximum impact from other ads.”
In the auditor's report, Missouri and Texas were identified as states that successfully specify performance measures, which include increasing tax revenues from tourism by a specific amount, increasing expenditures per person per trip, and guaranteeing a certain number of consumer inquiries as a result of advertising.