Case Study
Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge Turns the Holiday Shoulder Season into a Measurable Travel Opportunity
How a first-ever seasonal campaign drove stronger engagement, visitation, and lodging performance during a traditionally softer travel period.
June 9, 2026
Updated July 30, 2026Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge Turns a Shoulder Season Into a Growth Season
Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge (VBR) had already built strong momentum around the region’s outdoor adventure, scenic beauty, and peak fall travel season. But the holidays remained a classic shoulder season, one with real room to grow.
In 2025, VBR launched its first-ever regional holiday marketing campaign, designed to position the Roanoke region as a distinctive “metro mountain” holiday getaway. Running October 15 through December 15 with a $200,000 investment, the campaign focused on travelers within two to three hours of Roanoke and aimed to showcase a different side of the destination, including holiday markets, arts and culture, shopping, light displays, and local events.
The omnichannel campaign spanned search, social, sponsored content, display, audio, and connected TV. Rather than funneling all traffic to one general page, VBR used multiple creative messages, calls to action, and holiday-specific landing pages to help travelers find the experiences most relevant to them. As the client shared, this approach “seemed to make a big difference in generating better engagement and a lower CPC.”
Tourism Economics’ Attribution and Symphony dashboards helped connect campaign performance to measurable travel outcomes, tracking everything from landing page engagement to in-market visitation and hotel demand.
The Result
The campaign drove a significant increase in website activity, with paid traffic to campaign landing pages outperforming organic traffic and achieving a much higher visit rate. The Christmas Lights & Decorations page became the most-visited campaign page.
Lodging performance also strengthened during the holiday timeframe, with hotel demand increasing year over year and outpacing both state and national trends. In Salem, a co-op partner featured in the campaign, hotel demand increased during the promoted week and weekend as well.
Based on Tourism Economics recommendations, we are in the process of incorporating additional landing pages and messaging into our campaigns. With our holiday campaign, it seemed to make a big difference in generating better engagement and a lower CPC.
Virginia Blue Ridge – Symphony, WIC, MIC
