Getting a taste of intense commerce

Posted by bill

March 21, 2008

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I just got back from Hawaii on a family holiday. I was looking forward to quiet and catchup time with the family after spending lots of hours lately online as well as at work and I was able to do just that but also as a marketer I found a lot of ideas for how opportunity happens in a vacation town.

Marketing and extracting cash from travelers is an art fomr in Hawaii compared to probably any other place on earth. Everyone in Waikiki is on vacation and almost everyone is willing to open up their wallet a little more.

First of all we have to remember that when people go to Hawaii it is a little differnet then vacationers in Mexico. Mexico is full of all inclusive resorts and Hawaii seems to have none so the race to collect money from visitors is on the moment a visitor arrives at the Honolulu airport. We land and are at a loss for transportation so we stumble around with the crowd to a lineup for a $9 per person bus trip into town, I found another for $8 but with a family of four I was hoping for a cab, there were no cabs.

Food and Fun on Sale Now

The next morning we got up and there was at least someone on every block giving away flyers for restaurants, tours, and car rentals. You have to remember that there is still public transit that seems to be invisible through the car rental hype although really cheap, and everyone already has a hotel room so I saw no competition for that.

Every restaurant flyer had the headline of there food special but of course there was a lot more once you got inside the restaurant and no one mentioned the food special again so you had to remember it.

With the tours the operators tried to entice people with packages of two or three different events at once so that they could give deals and still collect more money and therefore a slice of the tourist dollar.

A ride can be so much more

We went to Hanamah Bay, a coral bay with lots of snorkeling and as I was telling my daughter how you could get a piece of tourist dollar by offering taxi rides in your car to a destination and claiming the profit a gut did exactly that. A fellow came to a crowded bus stop while we were waiting for the $2 transit bus and offered to take people in half the time to Hanamah Bay for $5 with a short tour. The best one on the island he said. The trip was definitely worth it with a big value add of interaction with the 10 or so passengers in the minivan. The trip was a gas, partly education and partly entrainment and all he was really doing was driving us 25 minutes or so across town. The kids and the adults loved it and it was a great little extra cost that we felt good about.

Automation in marketing

One of the most interesting aha moments for me on the trip after i had seen that upteenth person giving me a flyer for an Hanauma Bay tour was the fact that everybody is a first timer in Hawaii at some point in their trip. I may not need that 10th flyer but the guy after me may have got into town an hour ago and is looking for some prepackaged stuff.

This whole process goes on every day of every year and once a company has it set up they just have to leverage people giving out flyers or using some other message to get the message out to new people on a daily basis.

If you try to look at vacationers to Hawaii I bet that you can make correlations to your own website. People show up to your website for the first time everyday. How are you making sure the visitors will come again? How are you distracting your long time visitors compared to first timers? Are you adding value so that your visitors are interested in your offers? And finally is your site memorable, are you cutting through all of the hype of your competition so that people do in fact want to come back to your message and your information?

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