Life for destinations post-COVID-19 will present a unique challenge, which Bandwango proposes to solve by generating new DMO revenue streams. As hotel occupancy tax experiences yet another downturn, destinations are posed for harsher budget cuts and more scrutiny than ever before. While this is the reality for many DMOs across the county, it has forced a handful to reimagine how DMOs can diversify and maintain a more steady stream of revenue. While nothing can replace the value of taxes collected from hotels, motels and shared-economy rentals, diversifying revenue streams can lead to better stakeholder engagement and reliable surpluses that DMOs can lean on in times of crisis.
Bandwango’s flexible technology solution presents a possibility for destinations looking to shift away from this single-stream success model with four different solutions. Check out the options below and reach out to schedule a demo if one of them makes sense for your recovery plans.
Several of Bandwango’s clients utilize this model in order to pay their license fees or offset marketing costs, which helps free up allocated funds for other initiatives and generates a new DMO revenue stream. With Bandwango team assistance, our clients determine breakage points from financial models, which can help clients understand how to discount single tickets and tours more effectively or shift prices based on how many locations visitors usually redeem at with multi-business passes. Armed with this information, they can project revenue streams for the year and determine how to allocate those dollars on a rolling basis.
For single tickets & tours, Bandwango obtains wholesale pricing from attractions and tour operators that allow profit margins for the DMO on tickets and tours sold through the DMO’s Experience Marketplace.
In multi-business passes like brew passes and attraction passes, purchasers redeem a certain number of admissions or experiences over a certain number of days. Bandwango creates financial models that determine and deliver breakage profits on these passes to the DMO, so they can accurately project how much potential revenue these passes can generate and adjust prices accordingly.
In the past few years, Membership and Partnership teams have experienced new challenges in communicating benefits, but Bandwango provides a clear solution. The promise, delivery & reporting of direct spending through partner doors is the single most effective way to generate revenue in a Membership or Partnership department.
Bandwango programs are proven to increase the number of paying partners, the average revenue collected per partner and decrease partner attrition. How? In the past our clients have strengthened partnership revenue by making participation in Bandwango passes or Experience Marketplaces exclusive to partners or an up-sell exclusive to higher tier partnership levels. By providing our detailed reporting to merchants included in passes or Experience Marketplaces, the impact of the Bandwango product on member businesses and the value of partnering with the DMO is communicated in clear dollars and cents.
We realize Membership and Partnership departments have taken cuts post-COVID-19, but Bandwango’s servicing team provides a seamless way to fill in these gaps. Here are ways clients can activate our Bandwango Merchant Services team to aid in the Membership/Partnership model:
Educate and onboard merchants to the pass or Experience Marketplace
Collect assets from merchants to load into the system
Sell ad space on the web application to a contact list curated by the DMO of potential purchasers
Acquire content from merchants to include in segmented e-newsletters, e-blasts or SMS text messages to pass holder databases
As more and more hoteliers lean on their DMOs to bring visitation back to destinations post-COVID-19, the question of packaging is more important than ever before. Whereas in the past DMOs have relied heavily on OTAs to drive bookings, Bandwango presents a solution to bring the booking engine back to the DMO.
In developing Bandwango passports, DMOs differentiate themselves from OTAs by providing customers the seamless and exclusive offer of bundling a Bandwango savings pass, attraction pass or gamified trail with their stay. This strategy provides a point of differentiation between the two offerings and makes the DMO’s offer more appealing than that of the OTA. By providing potential visitors with an experience they could not get from booking with an OTA, the DMO packaging model is reinvigorated.
In the past, it’s been difficult for DMOs to adequately measure the impact local events have on visitation. While DMOs may not be hoping to get into the event game themselves, all can relate to the sponsorship woes and money given to local events only to receive little visitor data and virtually no way to retarget these visitors in return.
The solution to this is simple: when DMOs sponsor events by providing Bandwango’s ticketing platform, they get dual ownership of all visitor data and can craft and provide experiences surrounding the event. Using Bandwango technology, DMOs can offer tickets to local events and showcase their free or paid attraction passes, ale trails or savings passes all in one place.
Bandwango wants to partner with DMOs to get their visitors from local events out into the market to spend more money. With trackable economic impact data, detailed visitor profiles including zip codes and e-mail addresses, and the ability to whitelabel the platform to match any brand standards, Bandwango’s ticketing platform goes above and beyond competitors’.
