In the first half of April the requests for May and June increase: it is essential to intercept them

The requests for stays in the camping village for the month of May arrive with an average advance of 30 days, while those for the month of June with 47 days. This is the specific data of the booking window – i.e. the time between the request and the check-in date – which shows the Italian CampingVillage.Marketing Observatory, i.e. an analysis conducted on hundreds of thousands of accommodation requests sent by tourists to open-air facilities throughout Italy in 2021 (you can download a copy of this study here)

Analyzing the details of the booking window by month of stay (see the graph in the image above) can significantly help each structure to work vertically on the programming of offers/proposals per month. In fact, knowing that tourists tend to do their research (and send requests for quotations) 47 days in advance of their June holidays, it is clear the deadline by which to study the holiday proposals.

All visibility channels – including promotion portals – will then have to be updated to give maximum dissemination to those special offers and accommodation proposals. That’s right, because promotional portals represent the first point of approach between a camping village and tourists.

The strength of portals like CampingVillage.Travel is the possibility of presenting many different structures with a similar format. This is why tourists use this channel first as a source of inspiration and then as an information aggregator and search engine for the camping villages present in the chosen travel destination.

In reality, however, a promotion portal – if it is innovative and well structured – also acts subsequently, at all levels of the holiday search and booking process. Some examples of actions that a promotional portal such as CampingVillage.Travel can implement to present camping villages to tourists:

1. Activate campaigns to intercept active searches and thus attract their attention
2. Stimulate the interest of tourists with dedicated content to support the direct marketing channels of a camping village
3. Follow the user with retargeting campaigns to ignite and amplify the desire
4. Finally, study the most suitable call-to-action to lead the user to take an action, or contact directly the ideal structure for him

The goal of a promotional portal is therefore to take the user by the hand when he is still considering several hypotheses for his holidays, to accompany him to discover all the available solutions and then to direct contact with the ideal structure. Direct contact with the structures is exactly what tourists will look for in 2022.

It was they who declared it, in a survey that CampingVillage.Marketing carried out to get to know them better and understand how people evaluate and choose the ideal camping village for their next holidays. The CampingVillage.Marketing Tourist Survey, now in its 5th edition, is conducted every year to follow the evolution of the tourist; all properties can request a copy here.

An in-depth theme in this survey is how tourists will want to get in touch with the camping village where they stay in 2022. These are the answers given by over a thousand profiled tourists (in just 15 days of February 2022) to the question “How will you book your holiday?”:

As many as 77.20% of tourists replied that they will contact the camping village where they intend to book directly. A figure that appears to be clearly increasing compared to the historical one: in fact, to the same question in the “Tourist Survey 2021” the percentage of responses that provided for direct contact was 71.65% (+ 5.55%). It is interesting to note that tourists appreciate this direct relationship with the camping villages and do not want contacts to be brokered.

This data – together with the wishes of tourists that emerge from the survey – must be taken into consideration when evaluating the visibility channels of one’s own structure. To capture a customer, it will be essential to privilege those that allow direct contact with the structure and that encourage calls-to-action such as “Call now” and “Send your request”.

For all these reasons, promotion portals such as CampingVillage.Travel represent a privileged channel of visibility for a camping village, with an excellent cost/benefit ratio, unlike sales channels. Every facility must therefore make sure that they are present here, especially at the exact moment when users send their requests!