We recently sat down with the team from New Orleans & Company to talk about their recent success with Simpleview + Viator. Since launching the new Viator partner integration within Simpleview CMS in September, the destination marketing organization (DMO) has been able to garner over $85,000 in net booking revenue for its suppliers and also provide visitors with over 700 tour and attraction bookings in less than three months. New Orleans & Company has begun to see an increase in engagement and bookings and its visitors are finding exactly what they have been looking for.
What encouraged New Orleans & Company to introduce Viator to its website?
We have been trying to introduce a tour and attraction booking element on our website for about five years. We understood that it was absolutely needed on the website and that visitors were clamoring for it. We wanted to provide an avenue for visitors to the site to buy tour and attraction tickets, and we thought the best way to do that was with Viator.
What are two to three goals New Orleans & Company had when introducing Viator?
We were looking for a way to support our local suppliers and expand their reach while also being able to target consumers where they were already looking for opportunities. We serve our members; by having the Viator offering, we are able to get more people in the door, on the tours, and to the attractions by creating another doorway into their product for them. With Viator, we can do this in a more targeted way and on a larger scale than a local tour operator could.
We felt our consumers were interested in this as well. As a DMO that has a lot of tours and attractions in the city, it felt like a bit of a shortcoming not having booking services available for our site visitors. We have millions of visitors every year to NewOrleans.com — you could make a pretty strong argument that they are looking for things to do when they get here. By working with Viator, we’re able to give them more options on ways to enjoy their time in the city. One of the main goals of this whole platform is to deeply integrate these tours and attractions into the site so we can present these options when the people are ready to book.
Why do you think the Viator integration is important to your marketing strategy?
I think it is important to our marketing strategy because it gives us a way to support our members and deliver something that we feel our audience needs. This meets two goals for us at once; it allows us to showcase different experiences that are available to visitors throughout the city in a way that is easy for visitors to not only read about but to purchase. Prior to the Viator integration, we had great content but there were many steps to getting them to make a purchase. Now with the integration, it's literally a couple of clicks because of the prominent CTAs built right into the Listings Pro in Simpleview CMS.
Tell us about your success so far.
Our reports show that over $85,000 in net booking revenue was generated from September 11th through the end of the year for the suppliers (minus commission, which goes directly back into marketing). We had a booking on the first day of turning on the integration.
New Orleans & CompanyVisit New Orleans introduced the Simpleview + Viator integration in September 2023. In less than three months, its partners saw increased bookings and revenue, as well as the following results:
- The first booking came in on day one of being launched
- Over 700 different tours were booked via New Orleans & Company’s listings
- Total of over $85,000 in net bookings from mid-September to the end of the calendar year
- The top-performing supplier has seen over $2,500 in gross booking revenue since implementing the integration
