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 20, 2026Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge (VBR) had long seen success promoting the region’s outdoor adventure, scenic beauty, and peak fall travel season. But the holiday period represented a different kind of opportunity.
Spring campaigns helped build demand and fall travel carried its own momentum, but the holidays remained a classic shoulder season—one with room to grow.
In 2025, Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge launched its first-ever regional holiday marketing campaign, designed to position the Roanoke region as a distinctive “metro mountain” holiday getaway. The campaign ran from October 15 through December 15, 2025, supported by a $200,000 investment and focused on driving market visitors within two to three hours of Roanoke
The Opportunity
Visit VBR wanted to grow visitation during a traditionally softer holiday season while showcasing a different side of the destination—holiday markets, arts and culture, shopping, light displays, and local events.
The campaign also aimed to reach new regional audiences and elevate partners that had not always been central to the destination’s outdoor-focused marketing.
The Strategy
Visit VBR launched an omnichannel campaign across search, social, sponsored content, display, audio, and connected TV.
Instead of sending all traffic to one general page, the campaign used multiple creative messages, calls to action, and holiday-focused landing pages — helping travelers find the experiences most relevant to them.
As the client shared, “It seemed to make a big difference in generating better engagement and a lower CPC.”
Where We Came In
Tourism Economics’ Attribution and Symphony dashboards helped Visit VBR connect campaign performance to measurable travel outcomes.
Attribution dashboards showed how campaign landing pages performed, how audiences moved from website engagement to in-market visitation, and how the holiday campaign directly influenced visitation. Unique pixel and UTM naming made it easy to isolate results and pull campaign-specific metrics.
GA4 dashboards provided quick feedback on performance, including increased website sessions and users driven by paid traffic. Lodging dashboards then helped connect that engagement to destination performance, revealing hotel demand increased bookings year over year during the holiday timeframe and outpaced both state and national trends.
The Results
The inaugural holiday campaign delivered strong performance across digital engagement, website traffic, and lodging demand.
During the campaign period, Visit VBR saw a significant increase in website activity, with paid traffic to campaign landing pages outperforming organic traffic and the campaign pages achieving a much higher visit rate. The Christmas Lights & Decorations page became the most-visited campaign page.
The region also saw stronger lodging performance during the holiday timeframe, with hotel demand increasing year over year and outpacing broader state and national trends. In Salem, a co-op partner featured in the campaign, hotel demand also increased during the promoted week and weekend.
The Takeaway
Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge’s first holiday campaign created momentum in a softer season by pairing the right message with the right measurement strategy.
Through multiple landing pages, more specific creative, and Symphony-powered performance insights, Visit VBR gained a clearer understanding of what inspired travelers, which content drove engagement, and how the campaign translated into measurable, defensible visitation and lodging impacts.
Based on one of your recommendations after last year’s spring campaign, we are in the process of incorporating additional landing pages and messaging into this year’s campaign. We did that with our holiday campaign and it seemed to make a big difference in generating better engagement and a lower CPC.
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
