San Francisco Travel Wins Gold Adrian Award From HSMAI

The San Francisco Travel Association has received an Adrian Award from the Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI). The destination marketing organization’s San Francisco Culinary Campaign won a Gold Award in the category of Digital Marketing/Integrated Market Campaign for Consumers (B2C).

Founded in 1957, the HSMAI Adrian Awards embraces every segment of the industry, including hotels, airlines, cruise lines, car rental companies, destinations, credit card companies and more. Winners are selected from a field of nearly 1,200 entries by senior industry and media experts.

“San Francisco has long had a reputation as a must-visit culinary destination in the hearts and minds of foodies everywhere,” said San Francisco Travel Vice President of Marketing Communications Lynn Bruni. “However, with the popularity of farm-to-table regional cuisine and the advent of ‘celebrity chefs’ opening restaurants across the county, we were concerned about losing market share to other regions positioning themselves as ‘culinary destinations',” Bruni explained.

Utilizing a new “always on” content strategy, San Francisco Travel leveraged key moments in time, as well as the food and wine culture to create awareness of the city's culinary excellence and increase perception as a top culinary destination. A key component of the campaign included developing and promoting a series of culinary-related content across multiple digital platforms.

The target audiences were older millennial and Generation X travelers, couples and individuals (not families), from urban and suburban environments, domestically targeting Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago.

Utilizing the Destination Analyst Website Conversion Study 2014, San Francisco Travel determined that the digital culinary campaign had an economic impact of $23.1 million.

Equally important, San Francisco Travel’s research showed that the “Best Restaurants and Cuisine” attribute increased from 79.5% in 2015 to 82.4% in 2016.

“The success of this campaign required the participation of the entire Marketing Communications team. With a total budget of $50,100, we had to leverage all of the resources at our disposal. I am honored and proud to have our efforts recognized by the HSMAI Adrian Award judges,” Bruni said.

The San Francisco Travel Association is a private, not-for-profit organization that markets the city as a leisure, convention and business travel destination. With more than 1,400 partner businesses, San Francisco Travel is one of the largest membership-based tourism promotion agencies in the country.

Tourism, San Francisco's largest industry, generated record-breaking numbers in 2015. More than 24.6 million people visited the destination, spending in excess of $9.3 billion. More than 76,520 jobs are supported by tourism in San Francisco.