Dec. 19--PANAMA CITY BEACH -- Southwest Airlines is the Bay County Tourist Development Council's ticket to new markets in the Midwest.
The TDC confirmed at a meeting Wednesday its commitment to support the low-cost airline, approving a $900,000 budget to launch a digital marketing campaign in cooperation with Southwest, one of the two commercial airlines at the Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport (ECP) near West Bay.
The one-year campaign will target Web users who have visited Southwest.com through advertisements on the airline's 250 partner websites.
Tourist Development Council (TDC) Director Dan Rowe said once someone interacts with Southwest.com, the next website they visit could have a message from Panama City Beach.
"It's very highly targeted and there are different levels of consumers that we can go after with Southwest," Rowe said. "It's people who have flown here before; it's people who have inquired but haven't flown here. We can also target people in certain geographic areas and we can also target people who have flown to other beach destinations."
Funding for the campaign will come from the TDC's fifth-cent bed tax collections, an additional penny that was added to the tax specifically for promoting low-budget airlines. The agency entered into a five-year marketing co-op with Southwest in 2009, prior to ECP's opening, but chose to end the agreement one year early due to various changes in the airline's flight structure.
The TDC also reduced its funding toward the co-op in October 2012 after Southwest dropped its daily service to Orlando, bringing the airline's daily flights down to three. The contract required Southwest to provide daily flights to at least four destinations.
Southwest currently flies between ECP and Houston, Baltimore/Washington and Nashville, Tenn., as well as a seasonal route to St. Louis.
After the contract ended, the TDC continued to channel half of its fifth-cent revenue toward independent marketing in the destinations where Southwest flies. The other half was placed in the reserve fund, from where the new campaign funding will be drawn, leaving the account with $2.5 million.
"When the other agreement expired, there was a desire of members of the board for us to continue to have discussions with Southwest Airlines in the hope that we'd be able to keep those contacts and develop a new relationship with them for cooperative advertising," Rowe said. "This just augments the plan we already have."
In other business, the TDC reported a 16 percent gain in bed tax collections during October in Panama City Beach. Mexico Beach also saw a gain in collections, up nearly 20 percent over last year.
Copyright 2013 - The News Herald, Panama City, Fla.
