Travel Printing

For printers seeking a new niche, the travel and tourism market might just be the ticket. Print related products falling under this market include brochures, catalogs, rack cards, posters, billboards, menus, envelopes, postcards, broadsides, direct mail pieces, maps, and a whole assortment of other items. However, printer beware, this particular niche has taken a hit. The current recession and the growth of the internet have dampened print-related projects and decreased the amount of dollars being spent.

“The internet has certainly changed the dynamic as to how the public gets their information and the amount of printing we do,” says Christopher Heywood, vice president of travel and tourism public relations for NYC & Company, the official marketing, tourism and partnership organization for the City of New York. “While print is important to us, we will be doing less printing in 2011.”

Other travel and tourism sites are seeing more interest in getting their information from the web rather than from printed pieces. “Since I’ve been in this post for the past two years, I’ve noticed a dramatic decrease in the amount of printed pieces that tourists pick up,” says Mary Turner, executive director of the Texas Forest Trail Region, Nacogdoches, Texas. “Most people ask us what our web site address is.”

However, this doesn’t spell gloom and doom for printers in this niche. A beautifully-printed poster or brochure can often be the best resource to entice couples and families to spend their hard-earned dollars on travel to Hawaii, the Caribbean, or Europe. And sophisticated printers are stepping up to offer additional services.

Kevin Derryberry, a sales executive with Cereus Graphics, a general commercial printer in Phoenix, explained that since the travel and tourism business has changed, so has his printing company. “We can’t just offer ink on paper anymore,” he says. “We’re offering more marketing services. We help our customers analyze their data, find the best qualified leads on the list, and weed out the rest; then we help them decide the best print marketing options available to them. This is especially true in the travel and tourism market; you want to ensure that their advertising is going to a traveler who is interested or will become interested in visiting that location.  If they are going to spend $5,000 on a print run, we help them to ensure that their marketing piece goes to the strongest leads on the list where they get the best possible ROI.”

He adds, “Since the amount of travel and tourism printing has decreased, we as printers have had to become much smarter and more creative. You have to design and print relevant pieces that will trigger a response.”

Growth of travel and tourism pieces is being fed by the ease, speed, and quality of digital printing. A high quality, full-color travel advertisement can be printed on a glossy sheet at an affordable, cost-effective price, says Cory Rogers, marketing director for Copy Craft Printers, a national printing company based in Lubbock, Texas. Rogers says a large majority of its travel and tourism pieces are being printed as single sheet documents on their HP Indigo 7000 digital printing system.

“The ease and sophistication of desktop publishing and digital cameras is giving more travel and tourism sites the ability to produce very professional designs,” says Rogers. “We’re seeing a lot more full-color jobs and custom photographs being used on the printed jobs they give us. Instead of having to rely on stock photographs, we’re seeing clients, such as a recent camping site, give us a job where they’ve taken all of their own photos.”

 Whether a travel or tourism site brings some of its work under its own roof to save money or pinches back the amount of money being spent, travel and tourism printing has declined during the recession. “Printing for the travel and tourism industry has changed drastically,” says Derryberry at Cereus Graphics. “The volume of available dollars to spend on travel and tourism printing has declined; I would estimate that it has decreased by 12% to 30% but I could be on the low end. It might be much higher. In addition, the quantities have changed. In the past, we would print 25,000 pieces of a travel-related brochure; today, we might only print 15,000 pieces. In the past, we might have printed four versions of a travel piece; today, it would be only one version. We’re seeing pieces that might have been printed in both Spanish and English versions and today that same piece is printed with both Spanish and English on the same version to save money.”

Wayne Morris, president and founder of The Printing Port in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, has seen a change in the type of printing he produces for the tourism and travel industry. “For many years, we printed several multiple two-color pieces such as envelopes, rate letters, and a brochure. Now our customer is asking for either a self-mailer or a postcard. They are using more color on their pieces and they change their direct mail pieces more often depending on the season, perhaps specifically directed at golfers or families.”

Even the Texas Forest Trail Region has had to reduce its printing. “We used to print 20,000 event brochures in full color printing on a quarterly basis,” says Mary Turner, its executive director, “but since people aren’t taking them, we’re going to print 20,000 of them every six months. We still have 60,000 copies of our maps that we printed in September 2008.”

But travel and tourism related print projects are not dead and some printers are even seeing a rise in the early months of 2010. Creel Printing, a large family-owned sheetfed and web offset commercial printer located in Las Vegas, ties 20% of its printing to the travel and tourism magazine niche, according to Micah Armijo, national sales manager for Creel Printing. The firm produces a dozen or more western U.S. travel magazines from 64 to 200 pages with editorial, local advertising, and redemption coupons for tourists.

“We started with our first travel magazine for Las Vegas 30 years ago,” says Armijo. “It’s grown to include weekly and monthly magazines from digest to tabloid sizes with circulations from 10,000 to several hundred thousand. The recession has certainly hurt the tourism and travel business and we’ve seen a decline in the page counts over the past two years. But in the past few months, we’ve seen a positive change with page counts increasing. We think it will gradually improve.”

Creel is equipped with two Heidelberg M-2000 web presses and a six-color Komori sheetfed press with spot and overall coating capabilities.

While Wayne Morris of South Carolina’s The Printing Port agrees that the travel and tourism market did decline last year, he sees an uptick in the first few months of this year. “This March, we had a new start-up air service of direct flights from Toronto to Myrtle Beach called Porter Airlines,” he explains. “It’s a two-hour flight that will bring tourists and avid golfers to our area. The first flight was 93% booked. That’s a good indication of how travel to our vicinity is picking up.”

Heywood of the NYC & Company noted that his organization prints an Official Visitors Guide four times a year, unlike other tourism organizations that print one version annually. “We print 300,000 copies of each issue four times a year with different editorial, different covers, and different images,” he says. “In addition, we print 50,000 books and 25,000 CDs of a 160-page travel planner with a fold-out map and 20,000 books and 55,000 CDs of a 224-page meeting and events guide. It’s important to us and important to our consumers to have this information at their fingertips. They’ve come to expect it.” While many of New York City’s tourists are from overseas or speak a different language other than English, the organization only offers foreign language information on its web site. “It is too costly to print our guides and brochures in a variety of different languages,” says Heywood. “We do have one pocket guide in a pared-down version in Chinese.”

Sometimes it is the location that can help or hurt a printer’s business in travel and tourism. For example, Copy Craft Printers in Texas receives a lot of work from the Caribbean and Hawaii where island printing is too expensive. “It is less expensive to print off-island,” says Rogers. “Plus, we’re one of the southern states that have no union so are prices are more competitive. On Hawaii, either the island is too small to handle the print job or it is too expensive to print there.”

The Printing Port, established in 1986 by Wayne Morris from an independent print brokerage firm to a highly-successful commercial printing company with state-of-the-art equipment, is situated right in the midst of 65% of its business. Morris’s vision was to establish his company as the source for printing for local businesses along the Grand Strand, a major tourist attraction stretching from Cape Fear, North Carolina to Georgetown, South Carolina with its primary city, Myrtle Beach, attracting over ten million visitors each season. The Grand Strand is home to numerous restaurants and theme parks, making it popular with families and college students in the summer and retirees and golfers during the winter.

Today, The Printing Port has two locations with 20 employees and utilizes a half-size five-color sheetfed press, a Heidelberg GTO 52 20-inch press, and digital printing. A Heidelberg die cutter gives the firm the ability to print and die cut pocket folders, presentation folders, and custom die cut products. “The majority of our business is local,” says Morris. “We just printed one million hang tags for a local hotel and 400,000 score cards with the golf course’s design on one side.”

Others bemoan the fact that they aren’t using local print shops. Turner of the Texas Forest Trail Region says she used to use local printers for her printing but has since been giving her bids to out-of-state print shops due to competitive pricing. Cereus Graphics in Phoenix, would like to see its tourism printing stay in-state. “For years, our business was based on building relationships with our clients,” says Derryberry. “It is so frustrating when you see the Arizona Department of Tourism, a division built to bring tourists into our state, send their printing to an out-of-state printer.”

While the recession begins to lift and travel begins again in earnest, printers agree that this segment is an important one to serve. “It’s a very demanding industry,” says Rogers of Copy Craft Printers, “but important to be in. We excel because we offer personalized service and extensive experience with clients and customers in this fast-paced industry.”

Some travel organizations are trying to take advantage of one-on-one marketing to acquire new members and encourage travel among existing clients. One such company is Club ABC Tours, a travel membership organization operating in the New York Tri-state area.  Working for the past two years with Magjak, a printing company and 1:1 printer located in Port Chester, N.Y., the tour organization decided to forgo its traditional method of printing large, undifferentiated brochures and began to use personalized campaigns designed to encourage people to travel despite the economic climate.

“We work consultatively with Club ABC to assess their client information database as well as their tour product asset library of descriptions and images,” says Richard Fehn, vice president and general manager of Magjak. “Then we collaboratively engineer brochure wraps to more effectively leverage this existing data and assets.”

The most recent campaign involved Club ABC’s customers who have not traveled in the past 24 months or let their membership lapse. The tour organization had an offset printer produce 50,000 generic catalogs of their tour offerings. Then Magjak produced a few thousand personalized full-color wraps to encircle the catalog.

“The wrap may say ‘We miss you, Billy and Beth’ and include several photos of their most recent trip,” explains Fehn. “Then the inside front cover will display vacation tours that are deemed the best fit for this particular couple; perhaps another trip to Italy or something similar to another preferred member destination.”

Magjak utilizes a Xerox iGen4 digital press with Creo Spire RIP, driven by output generated by XMPie’s PersonalEffect platform. Turnaround is approximately eight weeks from the initial planning stage through programming and production to the first mail-drop. Subsequent mailing, says Fehn, occur in a much shorter time frame by utilizing the existing campaign framework.

“We’ve received very good feedback from Club ABC,” says Fehn. “Better than expected. It is certainly better than traditional marketing. Our method allows them to build their revenue stream and create a marketing campaign using their own data. We’re offering our 1:1 personalized service to other companies who are contacting us to design campaigns for them.”