challenge
How do you quickly rebuild a visitor economy in the wake of a devastating hurricane? After Maria struck Puerto Rico, the visitor economy was bottoming out, hotels were reopening with fractional occupancy and media coverage was focused on disaster instead of recovery.
There was an urgent need to shift the narrative and drive a rapid bounce back. This meant that Miles and Discover Puerto Rico had to develop a comprehensive strategy, content assets and a new world-class tourism website in record time.
solution
We focused on building a new digital presence that would enable travelers to rediscover Puerto Rico’s mouthwatering food, vibrant culture and breathtaking scenery—and encourage visitation to areas of the island outside of San Juan.
Applying a strategy built on third-party research, audience personas, search data and more, we aligned the site infrastructure and content with Puerto Rico’s primary audience personas and built a component-based site using an open-source Drupal platform. This allowed for a fast launch of the core experience and the ability to easily add new features and functionality in the future.
By incorporating rich-media content that covers every municipality, thousands of immersive images and business profiles, the new DiscoverPuertoRico.com connects visitors with a vast range of island experiences and vistas.
To speak to core audiences individually, we implemented personalization strategies that amplified the ease of travel messages for direct flight markets and drove audience-specific KPIs.
results
We launched the new DiscoverPuertoRico.com in just 90 days, complete with 300 pages of editorial content, 2,000 images and more than 6,000 business listings.
Even after outstanding initial results, the ongoing evolution of Puerto Rico’s digital strategy has most recently netted year-over-year increases of 515% in paid search traffic, 362% in organic traffic, 409% in sessions and 467% in pageviews.
The new website was recognized with a 2019 U.S. Travel Mercury Award for Best Travel Website and—most importantly—the site helped drive the fastest comeback from a natural disaster in U.S. history: 2019 was a record year for visitation and spend on the island.