It was a no-brainer to transition Visit St. Lucie County’s existing Treasure Coast Wine & Ale Trail to a digital passport on Bandwango’s platform. The trail is focused on giving visitors and locals a unique craft beer experience along the Treasure Coast and includes 9 breweries, one winery, one cidery, and one meadery.
To be included on the trail, a partner must be within St. Lucie, Martin or Indian River County and produce its own wine, beer or cider on premises. Additionally, partners are required to have a tasting or tap room that is open to the public.
The organization set out to measure the success of the transition in three ways:
Increase exposure of the trail
Increase passholder redemptions
Increase overall usage of the trail
“[Bandwango] solved the challenge of being able to track usage, redemption and collect visitor/user data that is important when showing ROI to our partners and stakeholders,” Tayler Hardison, Senior Tourism & Marketing Coordinator for Visit St. Lucie said.
Visit St. Lucie still distributes printed trail maps at visitor locations for users who want to complete the trail the old fashioned way, but the digital pass has made life easier for merchants since they no longer have to have physical inventory on hand or learn from a training guide. Instead, the digital pass communicates everything to the user.
“Our partners wanted a digital version years ago,” Hardison said. “Being able to bring all our partners on board with the ease saved us so much time, and the feedback has been very positive. One partner shared that the pass has brought more awareness and guests into their establishment.”
Success Metrics:
550 sign-ups
970 check-ins
336 active passports
Metrics are from May 2022 (launch) - November 2022.
The program’s success is in part due to social media campaigns Visit St. Lucie launched to promote the passport, which generated over 1,197 clicks and reached more than 76k potential passholders.
Visit St. Lucie sent out targeted e-blasts and engaged with earned media to get the word out about their newly launched digital pass. Additionally, they took the time to post QR codes in strategic locations to promote the pass and encourage more people to sign up for the trail.
For those interested in completing the Treasure Coast Wine & Ale Trail, fear not, Visit St. Lucie plans to keep the program going and promote the pass more aggressively next year by spreading the word via social campaigns, e-mails and in-feed messaging tactics.
