Making Travel a Consumer Priority, with Bree Nidds
Episode 306
Bree Nidds is a tourism, travel, and hospitality professional. She is often found speaking, facilitating, and presenting as one of tourism’s biggest advocates. She is Vice President of Sales & Operations at Discover Lehigh Valley, where she resides in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Bree was honored with the Smart Meetings Catalyst Award: Rising Star in 2021 and has been named “20 in Their Twenties” by the Professional Convention Management Association and “30 under 30” by Destinations International. In her free time, Bree enjoys competing in triathlons and swim competitions.
On this episode of Destination on the Left, I talk with Bree Nidds about the importance of the travel industry working collaboratively to elevate travel in the minds of consumers. She shares her insights about how in-market advertising helps drive visitation and why working collaboratively in the meetings, events and sports markets can help enhance future visitor numbers.
What You Will Learn in this Episode:
- Bree’s journey in destination marketing and how her previous experiences lead her to Lehigh Valley
- What’s coming up for destination marketing organizations in the spring, and how we can prepare our teams for the future
- Creativity in the tourism and hospitality industry space and what Lehigh Valley is doing to help their destination stand out from the crowd
- How community building became a part of Lehigh Valley’s marketing strategy
- Some of the things in the pipeline for Bree and Lehigh Valley
- How Bree and the team use data to drive their marketing strategy
- The collaboration that saw Lehigh Valley hosting an inaugural cycling event involving 1500 riders
- Bree’s advice for setting the groundwork for a successful collaboration or partnership
- How Bree sees the future of destination marketing evolving in 2023 and beyond
Travel as a Consumer Priority
People have so many choices about where they spend their money, and destination marketers need to understand where travel ranks on that list of people’s priorities. On the podcast, Bree shares why it’s a personal goal of hers to look beyond how Lehigh Valley is competing with other destinations and understand how we compete with other industries.
Marketers help travel and tourism to remain a high-ranking option on visitors’ to-do lists. In the industry, we need to think about the bigger overarching story we need to dig into as a community to stand out. Collaboration is the key to bettering ourselves in destination marketing, and Bree explains why, in Lehigh Valley, they are keen to leverage as many opportunities as possible.
Data-Driven Insights
We dive into the data and discuss the valuable insights it generates about a destination. Bree shares why their partners are interested in that information and why the COVID-19 pandemic gave them the impetus to look at the figures and understand the forecasting.
She goes on to describe how that information allowed Lehigh Valley to think about what their destination needs to do to gather the right data and use it in a resourceful way to make decisions about their tourism economy.
Moving Forward into 2023
Bree and I also talk about why she is so excited about moving forward into 2023 and the development in terms of their hotel room supply coming into the market. She discusses Lehigh’s impressive growth over such a short period, what that means for their tourism economy, and how it drives their marketing strategy.
Resources:
- Website: https://www.discoverlehighvalley.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bree-nidds/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lehighvalleypa
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lehighvalleypa
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lehighvalleypa/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/DSCVRLehighValley
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