10 Tips for Attracting Tourists to your Destination

Every traveler has a dream destination, no matter where they live. Some wish they could capture their favorite scenery in the frame of an iconic landmark, such as the Eiffel Tower. Others long to visit old castles and monuments across Europe. With so many wonderful places around the world, how can you make your city, town or country stand out? With the 10 helpful tips listed in this post, it will be much easier to attract tourists to your destination.

What Attracts Tourists to Destinations?

As a result of the lockdown period, many of us have become homebodies. Although it’s great having our own space and enjoying it, we still need to step out of our comfort zones sometimes for inspiration and renewal. Most people have a favorite destination, but can also be open to visit new places.

At first, it might seem difficult to motivate people to come to your destination. However, all you need to do is to present it the best way you can. For example, you can research some local history, and then share the most interesting facts. You can also take nice pictures or make entertaining videos of local attractions or events. People will be naturally drawn to it.

Each place is unique and has its own energy. Therefore, you can work on discovering your destination touristic strengths. What does the local business look like? Do you have specialties and singular products? What do people like to see when they visit your town? What are the best local hotels and views? Is it easy traveling to it? 

Once you answer these questions, you will understand what attracts people to your town and, consequently, can highlight those to increase local tourism even more.

10 Ideas to Attract Tourists to your Destination

Before the pandemic, travel played a huge role in propelling economic growth in many countries. Now, as we navigate our way out of this challenging period, we are seeing a return of the leisure tourism industry, bringing much needed revenue to touristic places all over the world. But how can you attract tourists to your destination? Take a look at these 10 tips for attracting tourists.

1. Be Present Online

​​Traditional promotion techniques like billboard advertisements or catchy jingles are no longer enough. To truly engage potential tourists, you must have an online presence with a well designed website highlighting all the most interesting things about your destination. 

After setting up your website, showcase yourself on different channels like popular industry forums, review sites and mapping applications. You can also use social media platforms to interact with people and attract tourists to your destination.

Investing in tourism marketing and search engine optimization can drastically improve your visibility, driving increased website traffic, and building tourism awareness.

2. Promote Local Attractions 

To ensure you captivate people's interest in local attractions, make sure you advertise them effectively. Most famous local attractions will have their own website and social media pages. Furthermore, these sites are well-known for the excellent services, delicious food, and attractive scenery they provide. This presents an abundance of opportunity for creating interesting tourist guides, events, and festivities.

In order to ensure success in advertising your destination, keep updating all local attractions’ information. People naturally gravitate towards items that are routinely visible. Furthermore, creating a feeling of fear of missing out can make your destination really stand out. 

3. Promote Local Events and Businesses

Events are one of the easiest ways to bring people into your city or town. To attract tourists to your destination, promote local events and businesses. This includes everything from festivals to concerts to sporting events. People love to go out and enjoy themselves, especially during vacations. They’ll appreciate knowing about upcoming events in their community.

You can also host events and virtual conversations regarding your destination, and then promote them on both your website and social media platforms. If you have an event coming up, make sure to advertise it well in advance so people will know when and where to go.

Moreover, you can use this opportunity to make local partnerships and engage your community. This will help improve and expand local tourism, as well as increase revenue for everyone involved.

4. Host a Festival

Festivals are a fun way to bring people together, attract tourists and celebrate something special. They also provide an opportunity to promote your business and showcase what makes your location unique. You can use them to showcase local talent, food, art, music, and more. 

If you live in an area with lots of artsy people, consider hosting an event where artists can display their work. This will help build awareness of your city or town as well as give locals a chance to show off their talents.

A food festival is also a fun way to bring together local businesses and residents to celebrate the local culinary culture. You can use these events to promote tourism by offering free samples of local products.

People love festivals because it’s an opportunity to engage with subjects of interest, consume local foods and beverages and celebrate! You can learn a lot about the type of people that like to visit your destination by hosting festivals frequently.

5. Provide maps and directions to local events and attractions

It is no secret that Michelin achieved renown with its annual guidebook reviews of superior restaurants and services. While the digital age may complicate the promotion of such guides, it is still easy and economical to generate guide web content on exciting attractions in a specific destination.

While advertising your event, some applications give you the option of incorporating a map widget on your webpage. This can serve to encourage guests to follow through with their arrangements, as the destination will be easy to locate, especially when the exact location is difficult to find.

6. Create an email list to share information about your destination

Gathering customer information and email subscriptions through your website is an effective method for forming a mailing list. Such list provides an avenue for you to keep your users informed about any new events, promotions, and upcoming destinations. All this while you attract tourists to your destination.

As event promoters, it's essential for us to make sure that our users have the opportunity to opt-in or opt-out of receiving our newsletter. Respect for their wishes is essential for building trust and engagement. To further increase engagement, be sure to regularly update your mailing list and utilize a quality email newsletter app to share your content.

Promoting your newsletter and destination the right way can increase its attendance exponentially. Make sure to always provide useful information related to your event and make people aware of all the great experiences awaiting for them!

7. Share tourism events and attractions on social media

Social media is the soul of any good business these days. If people want information about your business, they’re more likely to search for it on Instagram or Facebook than your own website.

To promote your destination on social media, try posting short videos together with discounts and special promotions. You can also call a local celebrity or digital influencer to spend some time in your destination and tell people what they think of the experience.

Remember to draw attention to what is unique about your destination, promote events to tell people more about your destination. If you wish, you can even take them on a virtual tour to make everyone engaged. Use your imagination and be sure everyone will love it.

8. Offer free tours and tourist events

One of the easiest ways to attract tourists to your destination is by offering free tours. Many trails and local beauties are difficult to find for outsiders. By offering them free tours, you can make these places better known to your visitors.

With a local specialist, both you and the participants will be able to experience the excursion to the fullest. Don’t forget to motivate local businesses to offer their products along the way. It’s great to find some nice foods and beverages along a trail, or just buy souvenirs for our beloved ones.

A successful strategy to boost this service is to implement an online scheduling tool to let people reserve their tour in advance. Surely, collecting registrations in advance will give you time to prepare for the attendees you’re expecting. Moreover, it will help you determine what is successful about your approach, how to address your audience, what their preferences are and much more.

9. Provide discounted tickets for tourist attractions

To attract tourists to your destination, we strongly recommend offering discounted tickets to paid attractions. People budget for trips and plan their travels around special discounts, such as Black Friday and Boxing Day promotions. Providing affordable, repeatable deals on tickets not only helps you increase your visitor numbers, but also maximizes your profits over selling tickets at the standard price.

Furthermore, when planning events, diversifying experiences can allow for a more personalized approach. Incorporate different price ranges and discount tiers, such as early bird specials, tiered tickets, and VIP tickets. Through trial and error, you'll eventually be able to discern what appeals the most to your audience.

10. Attract tourists with an online events calendar

Utilizing an online events calendar is an advantageous strategy for keeping the community informed about events occurring in your city or town, as well as helping attract visitors. Furthermore, it offers a fantastic way to spotlight what makes your location unique and use the most effective approach to captivate people.

The best online calendars can be easily embedded in your website and help you centralize all your event management efforts. If you keep posting events regularly, people will be attracted by the possibilities that match their free time and the local beauties you promote. It is also wise to include shareable links to social media networks, allowing people to easily share exciting updates with their loved ones.

Attracting Tourists with Timely Event Management for DMOs

As seen above, to attract tourists to your destination, you have to market it to your potential visitors. This includes having a website and promoting your local attractions, events, festivals and businesses. It also means distributing all this content through your newsletters, social media channels, and online events calendar. 

Most reliable events calendaring software offer great layouts to draw attention to your event and features to automate event promotion. Timely Destination Marketing Software has all the tools you need to effectively promote your upcoming events and attractions, as well as collect event registrations and sell tickets online. Check out our DMO Event Calendar demo to see an example of how our platform would look like on your website. 

We hope these tips can be useful for you and your business. If you think you can benefit from our event management software, book a meeting to learn more about Timely, and all the solutions and services we can offer!