Key Audiences

Our three core audiences at a glance

The Destination Management Plan also notes that individual destinations will maintain their own segment priorities. For instance, Bath will continue to attract more traditional heritage enthusiasts, while the family fun market remains important for Bristol attractions and Weston-super-Mare. 

Eclectic Vibers

Eclectic Vibers are identified as the primary target market for the Visit West region in our Destination Management Plan. The plan describes them as younger visitors (under 40), travelling independently both domestically and internationally, and typically without children.  

This does not mean that we will stop considering other audiences, such as families at key travel times, but our proactive focus will be on the development of products and itineraries for Eclectic Vibers. 

This segment is motivated by broadening their minds through culture, heritage, interesting events and festivals, unique immersive experiences, and rural activities. They also value opportunities to socialise and "live like a local," with wellness and self-care being important to them. Crucially, they are hungry to explore spontaneously and pack a lot in, often using public transport and sharing their experiences on social media.  

The Eclectic Vibers concept draws on segmentation research by VisitBritain and Fáilte Ireland, synthesised by Blue Sail Consulting, and the group is seen as offering strong growth value due to both the size of the market and their propensity to spend. 

Visiting friends and relatives 

Beyond Eclectic Vibers, Visit West primarily targets two further visitor types with growth potential. The first is VFR (Visiting Friends and Relatives) - domestic and international visitors who are already present in high volumes in Bristol and South Gloucestershire, are less affected by seasonality, and participate in a wide range of activities. 

Bristol's younger, more diverse population (as reflected in the 2021 Census) makes this a particularly strong segment. Universities across the region are seen as a key lever for encouraging extended family visits.  

Business and event visitors

This segment consists of visitors travelling for work, conferences, and exhibitions, both domestically and internationally. Bristol ranks in the top 10 in the UK for business events and pipeline developments such as the Aviva Arena are expected to increase capacity significantly. Bath is increasingly seen as a top incentive destination in the UK.

Visit West’s Convention Bureau service supports event planners bringing conferences, meetings, events and incentive programmes to the Bristol, Bath and the wider West of England region. 

Our focus is on maintaining, managing and maximising established markets where visitors are already coming from, while also exploring emerging markets and maximising opportunities to engage. 

We reach these audiences through a combination of media and PR work alongside partnerships and travel trade engagement, to ensure any interest gained can be acted upon and, crucially, booked easily. We work with VisitBritain and others, to attend sales missions, host media visits, and distribute relevant updates to the in-market travel trade. We also work closely with UK-based DMCs to enable bookability for the international travel trade.  

We also work with Bristol Airport to support new and existing flight routes with a propensity for inbound travellers, as well as GWR for rail connections from other airports and key destinations. 

For more information about our work with the travel trade, see Visit West Travel Trade website. If you would like market-specific advice or information, please get in touch with us directly.

More information about some key international markets

Campaign targeting 

For our domestic consumer campaigns, we mainly target audiences within a two-hour journey of our destinations as those with the highest likelihood of visiting. We promote overnight stays to maximise the value of domestic audiences; to stay longer and spend more, exploring more of the destination and region at the same time. Our core audiences are London and south-east England, the M4/M5 corridors, including South Wales and the south coast. We also see higher numbers of visitors from those areas with flight links to Bristol Airport (such as Edinburgh and Glasgow) and along key train routes. Because of this, we work with train companies and coach operators to extend our campaigns.

Use of influencers 

In our seasonal campaigns, Visit West often works with a number of pre-qualified influencers to extend the audiences of our campaign messaging, encouraging them to produce content to showcase what’s on and what’s happening in Bath and Bristol in summer or over the Christmas period. We also host influencers and more traditional media throughout the year for destination features and content, aligning their audiences with our current messaging. 

International consumers 

To reach international consumers, we work with partners including VisitBritain, travel trade partnerships (such as Get Your Guide) and others. We host numerous media visits during the year from international publishers and influencers, spreading the message of our destinations to their audiences, which seeds interest and keeps our region front of mind. Our work with the travel trade ensures this inspiration is bookable by these potential visitors.

Dynamic content 

We have the ability to serve dynamic content to users of the Visit Bristol website (coming to the Visit Bath website soon). This means that users fitting different audience profiles or those from different geographic locations can be served content that is more relevant to them than the default homepage. Examples of this could include family audiences being served imagery with more of a family focus and content aimed at school holiday periods, or users from France having practical guides of how to get to the city, how to get around, and content in French.  

We are able to segment users either by IP address for location or by their history of pages viewed on the website. We can tag particular content to be served to these audiences, increasing views of relevant pages directly to these users.