It’s no secret that the Easter school holidays are one of the most profitable holidays of the year. With the holiday right around the corner, it’s high time to begin your preparations. To help you out, we analysed our extensive range of forecasting tools and identified important trends that can help you build a more profitable Easter marketing strategy.

Here’s what we found:

Savvy shoppers will hunt for special offers and good packages during the Easter period. To stand out, you’ll have to get creative. Know your audience and play to your properties’ strengths. If families are your market, make sure you have plenty of value adds. With household budgets under pressure decision makers will gravitate to all-inclusive packages or packages including activities to cap unexpected expenditure during their breakaway. Always offer your best possible rate to direct bookers.

Time your correspondence right and use the right channels to deliver your message. Speaking of channels, our reporting tools show that email is still king when it comes to increasing your e-commerce sales. Always make sure your messages are optimised for mobile as 64% of all bookers book via mobile channels and apps.

Living as a digital nomad was a trend accelerated by the pandemic. Now, working from anywhere is a firmly established lifestyle. Mid-week specials and reduced long stay specials will be a hit with this demographic. Ensure you offer free, high-speed internet and provide comfortable working spaces within your facilities with easy access plug points. Nomads travel with their families, exposing them to new environments, cultures, and experiences as an alternative to traditional schooling.

Investing in travel for self-improvement, and personal and emotional development is going to be a breakout trend this year. Reports show that 42% of travellers want a break that focuses on their mental and physical health. Almost half (44%) want to go on meditation or mindfulness retreats.

No longer content with learning how to cook, paint or craft, travellers want more from their time away – inspired by popular survival-based TV shows Getting in touch with nature and learning survival skills is the new 'upskilling' holiday. A considerable number of travellers will venture into the wilderness with friends or family, motivated by a desire to learn essential survival skills, especially if it will aid them in surviving in the corporate jungle too.

Travel with a purpose. This year will see the rise of socially responsible travel. Creating platforms to connect people with cultures by breaking down barriers between travellers and locals are extremely popular. Guests no longer want to live in separate worlds at the same destinations. Creating opportunities for guests to interact, uplift and leave a legacy behind will be a sure hit in getting your lookers to become bookers.

Now let's get to your action list based on the information above.

1. Create at least one or more family packages including some beverages, activities and some meals or snacks.
2. Check that your arrangements per room type are correct. Test your booking engine to ensure that extended families can easily book online. Remember that single parents travel with their children too and we found plenty of booking engines that did not show any available rooms for a single parent with kids.
3. If you have a spa, create a body, mind and soul retreat package with some special detox menu items, and access to your fitness facilities.
4. Extras – some items will always have a cost involved. Load these as extras ensuring budget conscious bookers can see them before they check out, possibly add them, and pre-calculate their stay`s expense.
5. Do you know that you can offer your guests a payment plan upon check out? This will be a sure fire hit with our budget conscious bookers.
6. Keep it exclusive. All your special offers should only be bookable directly. This reduces not only commission expenses, but direct bookers tend to spend more during their stay and are in the long run much more likely to return or refer friends and family.
   
7. Get your message out. Use the power of social media! Ensure that there is a call to action, create a sense of urgency, and provide your direct booking link. If you are unfamiliar with creating engaging content, Profitroom offers a range of fantastic Digital marketing services for you to make use of. Don't forget about paid marketing options, this accelerates your reach, is great for search engine rankings and it gets you to the top of the page.
8. Activate your newsletter discount to offer an additional discount. This functionality is sure to close the deal!
9. Make sure that your system settings accommodate combining offers. This way families, and digital nomads can extend their stay beyond the limited time offer period. If you are not sure, reach out to your Customer Success Manager for some guidance and advice.
10. Line up your automated messages (that can be strategically segmented) and get that database of yours to work for you.

Since you have already created the perfect Easter offer, it is worth using our Marketing Automation tool and sending an email campaign to your guest database informing them of how you can give the best value for money breakaway. The contacts in your database have already engaged with your brand and are likely to make a quicker reservation based on the new offers presented.

For those firecrackers, here are some more great features to utilise:

· Are you utilising vouchers to increase revenue during the festive lead-up?

· Increase your revenue by 10% with our abandonment cart tool

· Attract Direct: Rediscover the power of direct bookings