Dear TPID Participants:
First, I want to express how honored I am to serve as the inaugural TPID Board Chair. I also want to thank the full TPID Board of Directors for their time, service and participation. Please take a moment to familiarize yourselves with the board here.
The board remains mindful on how important communication is to our TPID participants. Therefore, below is our first quarterly TPID newsletter. We hope it is helpful to you and informs you on TPID strategies, metrics, and results.
In it, you will find updates on sales and marketing efforts against the current TPID Services Agreement. Coming out of our first board retreat, we continue to remain focused on our sales and marketing efforts to generate more group and leisure business for San Antonio.
If you need additional information or have suggestions on what is included in future newsletters, please do not hesitate to let me or the Visit San Antonio staff know.
Sincerely,
Henry Feldman
Chair
TPID Board of Directors
FINANCE
FY 2019 Current Year Service Plan
San Antonio’s Tourism Public Improvement District became effective January 1, 2019. Properties within the district with 100 rooms or more began to collect a 1.25% assessment on the sale of a room. These assessments are estimated to sum to just over $10 million in the first full year of the district. The properties remit the collected assessments on a monthly basis to the City of San Antonio consistent with their remittance of hotel occupancy tax.
Visit San Antonio is charged to help administer and manage the investments of these funds towards various sales and marketing initiatives at the direction of the San Antonio Tourism Public Improvement District Board of Directors. Because the TPID’s effective date (January 1, 2019) started in mid-year of fiscal year 2019
(October 1, 2018 – September 30, 2019) as well as the delay in timing of collections, the first fiscal year of the SATPID represents approximately only six (6) months of investment programming. The current FY 2019 Service Plan approved by the SATPID Board is referenced below.
SATPID FY 2019 – Service Plan/Budget
| Service Category |
Annualized $ | Initial Pro-Rated $ |
Initial % |
Approved $ 3-25-19 |
Approved % 3-25-19 |
| Marketing | $4.69 mil | $2.42 mil | 45% | $2.66 mil | 49.5% |
| Sales | $4.69 mil | $2.42 mil | 45% | $2.18 mil | 40.5% |
| Industry Partnerships | $521K | $269K | 5% | $269K | 5% |
| Admin & Research | $313K | $161K | 3% | $161K | 3% |
| Contingency Funds | $208K | $108K | 2% | $108K | 2% |
| TOTAL | $10.42 mil | $ 5.38 mil* | 100% | $5.38 mil* | 100% |
The SATPID Board of Directors are eligible to redirect up to 10% of program funds between the Service Categories on an annual basis. This strategy was exercised by the SATPID Board in FY 2019 to help influence growth in leisure demand over the summer of 2019.
Industry Data
While San Antonio’s Tourism Public Improvement District is relatively new, Visit San Antonio staff continues to monitor San Antonio’s industry performance as well as particular comp cities. Both staff and the TPID Board may utilize this type of information to help measure destination performance but also to help inform strategy development and direction of TPID resources.
Below is YTD industry data through June 2019. In summary, San Antonio has seen good growth in room demand helping to affect a slight increase in occupancy. However, this has been offset by a decline in ADR.
Industry Data — STR Comp Texas Cities
| Occ | % Ch Occ |
% Ch ADR |
% Ch RVPR |
% Ch Rev |
% Ch Rm Sup |
% Ch RNS |
Census # of Hotels |
Census # of Rooms |
|
| Austin | 74.6 | 2.5 | 2.0 | 4.5 | 8.8 | 4.1 | 6.6 | 352 | 41,328 |
| Dallas | 69.4 | -1.5 | 0.6 | -0.9 | 3.2 | 4.1 | 2.5 | 738 | 91,460 |
| Fort Worth | 74.3 | -1.4 | 1.9 | 0.5 | 4.0 | 3.5 | 2.0 | 342 | 34,400 |
| Houston | 64.6 | -3.9 | -3.9 | -7.2 | -3.5 | 4.0 | -0.1 | 944 | 92,605 |
| San Antonio | 68.2 | 1.2 | -3.8 | -2.6 | -0.8 | 1.8 | 3.0 | 438 | 47,810 |
Moving forward, staff will continue to monitor industry performance metrics as well as work with Smith Travel Research to begin to incorporate additional performance data more associated to those properties comprised within the district.
DESTINATION SALES
A huge focus of the SATPID is directed at driving groups to hold meetings, conventions and trade shows in San Antonio while strategically managing and simplifying the sales process for our meeting planners and partners. For fiscal year 2019, $2.17M was allotted for the funding of Sales initiatives to bolster the existing efforts of Visit San Antonio and our hotel partners, with the Board approving seven initiatives for immediate implementation and providing a 7 to 1 ROI based on total group room revenue spend. With a focus on business development and customer retention, Visit San Antonio implemented the following beginning in April 2019: Individual Hotel Incentive Program, Group Business Development Program, Addition of a National Sales Manager and In-Market Customer Events, just to name a few.
Although many of these initiatives are still in their infancy, we are excited to share with you a couple of key updates of the team’s efforts thus far. To date, the Individual Hotel Incentive Program has generated a total of 58 applications, driving an additional 24.5K group room nights/$4.7M in room revenue to our destination, specifically in 2019 – 2021. In fact, 63% of the allotted funds for this program supported groups specifically for 2020! The additional $1.1M allotted for Hosting Obligations has made a positive impact on our short term availability as well. Since implementation, we have extended a total of five hosting obligations representing an estimated 20.7K group room nights or $4.1M in room revenue for 2020 – 2023, providing a 29 to 1, ROI on room revenue! The Destination Sales Team was also able to attend three additional, secondary trade events due to SATPID funding, engaging 46 new customers representing 24K group room nights / $185.62 ADR / $4.45M in room revenue.
Looking ahead, the SATPID sales effort, which is managed by Visit San Antonio, will focus on the continuation of existing, approved initiatives, in addition to revenue optimization efforts and attendance building programs for our key accounts.
MARKETING
Results
TPID investment conversion results through July are 46:1 ROI, based on 357,072 visitor devices tracked to San Antonio.
The TPID marketing funding of $2.6 million added an additional 302 million impressions, or consumer exposures, to the San Antonio brand April-August. The funds were allocated across four channels: digital, TV/video, streaming radio and out-of-home.
Digital
The TPID funding enhanced the Summer digital media efforts more than doubling the impressions, including adding to search engine marketing, paid social media efforts, and Device ID tracking. Native and influencer marketing programs were added to leverage more authentic content channels. A program with Travel Mindset included an Instameet event taking place 6/23-6/30 bringing family blogger influencers to San Antonio. The event generated 265 posts and over 128,000 social engagements. In addition, an organized Twitter Chat on 7/24 featured a one-hour Q&A session titled “Crafting the perfect San Antonio weekend.” This event had 107 participants and generated 68.5M impressions and almost 1,600 tweets. Travel Mindset benchmarks for Twitter Chats are normally 30M Impressions per chat with 100 participants. A program with Storygize delivered native content using display and video formats. This tactic generated an average 0.27% CTR and 6% engagement.
TPID plan digital advertising efforts in Mexico through July served over 51 million impressions with an overall CTR of 0.79%. The strongest performing tactic was Facebook serving over 36 million impressions with 331,945 clicks for an overall CTR of 0.91% (benchmark is 0.80%-0.90%). This tactic also produced over 3 million social engagements.
In Canada, TPID plan digital advertising efforts through July served over 18 million impressions with an overall CTR of 0.15%. The strongest performing tactic in terms of CTR was Bing/Yahoo SEM, serving over 200,000 impressions with a CTR of 0.46%. The strongest performing tactic in terms of overall clicks was Facebook, serving over 9 million impressions with 17,320 clicks for an overall CTR of 0.18%. This tactic also produced 75,502 social engagements.
TV/Video
Additional funds expanded the market coverage for TV/video from 14 markets to 30 and covered diverse platforms to reach persona targets across multiple screens. A cable buy included linear cable, NCC GO and programmatic cable. Programmatic schedules included top 20 networks, such as AMC, BRVO, CNBC, ESPN2, FOOD, HGTV, NBCS, TBS, TRAV. NCC GO featured streaming and Video On Demand services.
San Antonio TV spots also appeared on special sports programs including NBA Playoffs, Women’s World Cup, MLB Rangers & Astros games, Stanley Cup Playoffs and NCAA Baseball World Series. A special initiative with Fox Sports Southwest Texas Rangers featured :30 spots during games, a custom voiceover spot, animated billboards, ticker flow and social media posts. With partners HULU and SpotX, San Antonio was featured on programming across key streaming services such as Direct TV Now, Fubo, Sling, Fox SportsGo, ESPN and CBS & ABC. Through daily, real-time negotiations, San Antonio spots appeared on networks CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox.
Streaming Radio
Partner Spotify was added to the mix in the Mexico and Canada plans. In Mexico there were more than 318,000 impressions with 781 clicks, resulting in a CTR of 0.24%. In Canada, there were more than 427,000 impressions with 677 clicks and a CTR of 0.16%. The benchmark CTR is 0.13%.
Out-of-Home
TPID additional funds more than tripled the impressions and added place-based digital outdoor to the plan. A special program with GSTV served 15-second units to gas stations across Texas, delivering 65% Urban Traveling Family and 35% History, Arts & Culture traveler targeted messaging identified through world class data partners like Claritas, Mastercard and distillery. Through July, digital outdoor has served 6,562,507 impressions. This placement garnered extensive coverage across Texas and touch state target markets.
Other Efforts
A new website SATPID.com was created to provide partners with a “home base” of information about the San Antonio TPID .