Destination Marketing Strategy: More Trips, Less Spend

Every destination marketing strategy written in the last few years assumed one thing: get more people through the door and the money follows. New data from VisitBritain's Great Britain Tourism Survey says that assumption is no longer safe. In Q4 2025 (October to December), domestic overnight trips in England rose 5% year on year to 23 million, and day visits rose 5% too, reaching 226 million. More people travelled. But spend per overnight trip fell 8% to £312, and spend per day trip fell 4% to £58. Total domestic tourism spend for the quarter came in flat on Q4 2024, at £20.1 billion.

Translation for anyone running a hotel, attraction or park: the crowd is growing, but each visitor is worth less than they were a year ago. A destination marketing strategy built purely to chase footfall will hit its targets and still lose ground.

The real problem: visits are up, value per visit is down

The VisitBritain figures break the pattern down further. Overnight spend on holiday trips specifically held up better than the average, down only 1% to £370 — which suggests the squeeze is hitting shorter, cheaper trips hardest rather than main holidays. Seaside destinations kept their share of England's overnight trips steady at 9%, and the share of trips that included visiting a visitor attraction actually increased in the quarter. So the appetite for attractions and coastal destinations is holding. What's falling is what each visit is worth once it happens.

Interestingly, the Isle of Wight is currently running against the national grain — the latest island figures showed fewer visitors but higher spend per visit. Opposite directions, same lesson: whether your volume is rising or falling, value per visit is the number that decides whether your year works.

For hotels, attractions and parks on the Isle of Wight and the South Coast, that's the real strategic question for the next twelve months: not "how do we get more visitors", but "how do we make sure the visitors we already attract are worth more — and that we can prove which marketing brought the ones who paid full price".

Why "more marketing" isn't the answer

Two problems sit underneath almost every destination brand we work with. First, the visuals undersell the place. Thin photography and dated video make a genuinely good destination look like an average one — and in a market where attraction visits are holding but spend per visit is dropping, a flat image is the difference between someone booking the premium package or the cheapest ticket.

Second, nobody can say which marketing produced last month's bookings. When budgets are already under pressure, that's expensive. Without clean attribution, the instinct is to spread spend thinner across every channel rather than double down on the one or two that are actually converting higher-value guests. Can you tell me which of your marketing produced last month's bookings? Most destination marketers we meet cannot answer that in one sentence — and it's usually the single biggest reason their budget isn't working as hard as it could.

A destination marketing strategy built for squeezed spend

1. Lead with the booking, not the impression

Reach and engagement numbers look fine on a slide and tell you nothing about revenue. Reframe every campaign brief around the booking it needs to produce, and the average value of that booking — not the views it needs to generate.

2. Make the visuals do more selling work

When visitors are prepared to spend less on average, the job of your photography and film is to justify spending more with you specifically. That means showing the actual experience, the actual rooms, the actual day out — well enough that upgrading feels obvious. Generic stock-style imagery doesn't move anyone from the cheap ticket to the premium one.

3. Build conversion paths for higher-value stays, not just more clicks

A website that only tracks traffic will celebrate a rise in visits while revenue per visit falls — exactly the trap the national data points to. Websites that convert need to be built around the upgrade path: the add-on, the longer stay, the better room — not just the booking button.

4. Track booking sources so you can double down on what pays

This is the step destination brands skip most often, and it's the one that fixes both problems at once. Once you can see which channel, campaign or landing page actually produced a booking — and its value — you stop guessing and start reallocating budget towards the marketing that's working in a tougher market, not the marketing that merely looks busy.

What this looks like on the ground

We run this exact approach for Luccombe Hotels, where the retainer covers the campaigns, the email programme and booking-source reporting that shows the directors precisely where every stay came from — source by source, not just in aggregate. It's the same reason our relationships with Visit Isle of Wight, Blackgang Chine and the Isle of Wight Donkey Sanctuary are measured in years rather than single projects: destination marketing that actually moves bookings takes sustained, accountable work, not a one-off campaign. It's also why Newsquest and LOCALiQ trust us as their white-label video partner across the South Coast — the work has to hold up under a bigger name than ours.

The bottom line for 2026 planning

Visitor numbers recovering is good news. But a destination marketing strategy that only tracks numbers will miss the fact that value per visit is falling nationally — and it will have no way of knowing which of its own campaigns are making that worse or better. Fix the two problems — visuals that undersell the place, and marketing nobody can trace to a booking — and you're positioned to grow revenue even in a quarter where the national average is sliding.

If you run a hotel, attraction or park on the Island or South Coast and can't currently answer which of your marketing produced last month's bookings, that's the conversation worth having first. Get in touch for a straight conversation about what's producing bookings in your marketing right now — and what isn't.

Ready to put this into practice?

At Media House we turn strategy like this into measurable growth. Let’s talk about how it applies to your brand.

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