Bleisure: Mixing Business with Leisure

Are “Bleisure” travellers an untapped opportunity for your hotel? Learn about Bleisure travellers, and whether there’s an opportunity for your venue.

What is a Bleisure traveller?

There’s a popular phrase that’s making the rounds that you might have heard: "Bleisure travellers". Bleisure travellers are business travellers who have either combined or extended their trip for leisure purposes. Often meaning that they’ve added a couple of extra days for leisure at either the beginning or the end of their stay.

The Importance of Bleisure Travel

At Hotelchamp, we looked at a sample of over 100 hotels and broke-down the data for solo travellers (searching for one guest). Based on what we know about how and when people travel for business, we defined and then divided these segments according to arrival and departure date:

• Pure business: arrival and departure is a weekday
• Pure leisure: arrival and departure is a weekend
• Bleisure: stay includes a weekend and a weekday

What we found was quite surprising. For these solo travellers, 50% of all stays were purely business, 20% were pure leisure, and the second biggest segment was Bleisure, with 30% of stays assumed to be a Bleisure stay, based on this definition.

According to research by Expedia Group, 43% of survey respondents extended their business trips for leisure.

• Domestic business trips:  42% bleisure
• International business trips: 52% bleisure

What’s most interesting from this study is that Expedia Group found that 84% of bleisure travellers stay at the same hotel for the business and leisure parts of their stay. Meaning, this group is a great group to target.

A Bleisure Campaign with Hotelchamp

Using Hotelchamp tools and targeting, you can easily create a campaign targeting these solo visitors checking-out on a Friday or Thursday (or checking-in on a Monday or Sunday). After they've searched their dates, you can display a promo code or voucher to encourage them to extend their stay.

As we know, the Bleisure visitor will likely be extending their stay to enjoy the city. Based on this, you should consider offering complimentary (but low cost) add-ons to enhance their leisure part of their stay.

For example offering:

• Tickets to museums or galleries — you can easily offer discounts by utilising our partnership with Tiqets and Klook
• Drinks in your hotel's bar
• Transport
• Breakfast for the weekend days
• Local experiences (e.g. tours)
• Bike or car hire

Some other things to consider are highlighting, or providing value with information. This could be communicating events that are happening during their stay, or highlighting nearby points of interest or key areas in the city.

Revenue Logic

Using Hotelchamp's targeted messaging for Bleisure travellers is powerful because if a visitor changes their dates after seeing the message, you know that this was because of the message shown. Therefore, any added nights should be seen as pure additional revenue. With this in mind, you can offer more to encourage people to extend their stay than normal, because there is no opportunity cost (the visitor would not have booked those extra nights without an offer).

Remember that you can still optimise the offer based on how reactive your audience is to different types of offers. If you see a low percentage of people extending their stay based on the offer you are promoting then you should keep adjusting it to find the right fit for your guests. You should also consider how likely it is that your hotel will sell-out on those days of the week. If you up-sell a business traveller to add a Saturday night, but the hotel is always at 100% occupancy on Saturday, then giving offers is counter-productive to your revenue strategy.

Bleisure campaigns are a great way for many hotels to tap into an audience that hasn’t been fully explored yet. Using Hotelchamp technology, it’s so simple to get up and running.