In travel — as in life — it pays to have a strategy. This autumn, the concept of “season stretching” is not only proving to be a popular trend, but a tactic of ensuring that both visitors and destinations reap the benefits of travel outside of their conventional peak seasons. But if you look beyond strategies and tactics, season stretching soon becomes a more mindful and considered way to travel. At its heart, this is a seasonless phenomenon that’s well-suited to the ever-changing world around us, something that’s worth exploring the whole year round
What is Season Stretching and Why Does it Matter?
In practical terms, season stretching is a way of prolonging a destination’s appeal to visitors outside of a place’s conventional peak period. From the perspective of a destination marketer, this means accentuating all that a place has to offer visitors during its shoulder or off-season.
Let’s say, for example, that you work for a Destination Marketing Organisation (DMO) representing a European beach or seaside location that traditionally draws in the crowds during the hot and sunny months of August. We’ll get into this more below, but in this case season stretching — as it applies to your destination — could be something as simple as making travellers aware — say, via a targeted campaign, strategically written content or a well-timed partnership — that your destination can also be enjoyed in glorious conditions in September or October, when crowds are thinner, prices are lower and, even better, the atmosphere is a little less frenetic.
For a destination, this new angle has multiple benefits; for example, season stretching helps ensure a steady flow of visitors throughout the entirety of a calendar year — not just the peak of tourist season. For communities, season stretching can also support local economies by providing jobs year round and — from the all-important sustainability perspective — season stretching can go far in mitigating overcrowding and overtourism.
Practical Pointers for DMOs
One of the inherent beauties of season stretching is that there are so many ways for destinations to embrace it and make it their own. Whichever angle you take — be it creative marketing, the offering of tailored services or canny strategic partnerships — this is a concept that lends itself to multiple practical approaches, making it scalable and doable for DMOs of all sizes.
In practice, season stretching demands the active marketing of your destination’s off-peak charms, attributes or attractions. Be it nature or uncrowded beaches, quieter museums and art galleries or the chance to enjoy a charming ambience at a slower pace, it pays to look objectively at what your destination has to offer in the off-season, so pick a point, and then leverage it via platforms like Instagram, YouTube or TikTok to showcase serene, uncrowded attractions or seasonal experiences in your destination.
Another take on season stretching is to create special deals or offers that bundle accommodation, dining and local activities (say, a wine trail tour or a foraging excursion, for example) into a single package, which brings with it an opportunity to generate revenue with a specific campaign package for your members to buy into. Be sure to carefully promote these packages right before the end of your high season in order to attract visitors to your destination in the off-peak. On this point, these kinds of initiatives lend themselves well to collaboration with local businesses, so be sure to cultivate a solid rapport with area hotels, restaurants, shops and tour operators to generate a kind of collective benefit.
Packages aside, you can also take a closer look at your destination’s calendar to use any annual cultural events, festivals or markets to build your off-season buzz. Building on this further, you could use niche events and angles to target certain subsets of travellers, be they into adventure, wellness, the arts, food, etc. The point is, whatever your destination has to offer, there’s always an angle for season stretching.
Season Stretching in Action
Here at Simpleview, many of our clients are eagerly embracing season stretching and all of the benefits it has to offer both visitors and destinations. For example, both Visit Norway and Visit Sognefjord have taken advantage of the changing seasons — and all that they bring to this part of northern Europe — to create content that excites, attracts and engages with travellers who may not necessarily consider an autumn or winter visit to the country. Looking further afield, the Isle of Wight — well-visited during the summer months for its reliably sunny weather, its gorgeous beaches and its famous music festival — has turned to the stars to reel in travellers during the much quieter season. With the air crisp and the skies clear, autumn transforms the island into the perfect destination for stargazers, with content dedicated to offering helpful pointers for those who want to find the best vantage point for sky watching.
Moving on, we all know that there’s nothing like the Lake District in the summer. But when it comes to season stretching, this region of England carefully plays up all that the cooler months have to offer. Just like the Isle of Wight, it too is a prime location for stargazers and — for those on the fence about an autumn or winter visit to the area — its Dark Sky Cumbria page reminds prospective visitors that autumn brings the chance to spot the Milky Way while winter is the perfect time for meteor showers. But for those interested in more earthly pleasures, the Lake District plays host to a plethora of autumn food festivals (with plenty of local produce to sample) and is the perfect backdrop for those looking to take a ramble — without the crowds of high summer.
But whether you’re a destination or a visitor, the world of travel is — like life itself — full of peaks and troughs. And whether you want to call it a trend, a tactic or a strategy, the beauty of season stretching is all down to its infinite flexibility, one that enables destinations and visitors to not just navigate the highs and lows of the year, but to benefit from the goodness of travel the whole year round.
