Turning a summer destination into an all-season brand
Posted by Lizanne du Plessis on October 29, 2026
DESTINATION & HOSPITALITY GROWTH STORY
Grande Provence Heritage Wine Estate is one of Franschhoek’s established destination estates, bringing together accommodation, restaurants, wine tasting, events and weddings within one experience.
During the busy summer season, international tourism and the Franschhoek Wine Tram bring strong natural demand.
The challenge was winter.
Grande Provence appointed Eco Africa Digital in early 2026 with a clear commercial objective: strengthen local awareness and increase direct demand during the low and shoulder seasons.
Rather than waiting for winter to begin marketing winter, we started building the positioning in January.
The strategy was simple:
Establish Grande Provence as a destination for all seasons, then convert that awareness when winter arrives.
In August 2026, Grande Provence reported its strongest August trading month in the estate’s history.
The partnership has subsequently been extended, with additional investment in AI Concierge, SEO, GEO and AEO discoverability.
Grande Provence did not have an awareness problem during peak tourism season.
Summer naturally brings high volumes of international visitors to Franschhoek.
Winter is different.
International visitor numbers decline, the Wine Tram delivers fewer travellers, and the estate needs to create more of its own demand.
The opportunity was therefore not simply to advertise harder during winter.
It was to change how the local market thought about Grande Provence.
We needed to move the brand from:
“somewhere tourists visit in Franschhoek”
toward:
“somewhere I would choose to go throughout the year.”
One of the most important decisions was timing.
We did not begin the winter campaign in winter.
From January, we deliberately started positioning Grande Provence as an all-season destination.
Content consistently reinforced the wider experience:
By the time autumn and winter arrived, the market had already been exposed to that positioning.
We could then remarket to audiences who already recognised and had engaged with the brand.
Demand was cultivated before it needed to convert.
The winter strategy was deliberately local.
Rather than continuing to target international audiences during a period when fewer of those travellers were physically in South Africa, campaigns focused specifically on:
A strong drive-market audience capable of visiting Franschhoek for dining, weekends away, celebrations and wine experiences.
A high-value domestic travel market with strong potential for short leisure escapes to the Cape Winelands.
This allowed marketing investment to follow a realistic commercial opportunity rather than simply continuing the same targeting throughout the year.
The strength of the Grande Provence campaign came from consistency.
The same commercial objective was carried through across the digital ecosystem.
Content continually reinforced Grande Provence as more than a summer wine-estate visit. Seasonal storytelling helped create reasons to visit throughout autumn and winter.
Paid search captured people actively looking for relevant accommodation, dining, Franschhoek and Winelands experiences.
Meta campaigns helped create demand among targeted local audiences and remarket to people who had previously engaged.
Search-led editorial content strengthened the estate’s visibility around relevant destination and experience searches.
Mailer campaigns allowed Grande Provence to communicate directly with an existing audience around seasonal experiences and reasons to return.
The important part was not any one channel.
Every channel was reinforcing the same strategic position.
By starting early, we were able to build engaged audiences before the slower season arrived.
Those audiences could then be remarketed during autumn and winter with more relevant reasons to visit.
Instead of asking a completely cold audience to suddenly book a winter stay or restaurant experience, we were reconnecting with people who had already encountered the brand.
This created a much stronger path from:
awareness → familiarity → seasonal relevance → action
Accommodation was an important part of the strategy.
Franschhoek is often associated with warm-weather wine tourism, but winter offers its own appeal:
Our content and paid-media strategy helped reposition the accommodation experience around those seasonal reasons to travel.
The objective was not to pretend winter was summer.
It was to make winter desirable in its own right.
Grande Provence is not only a place to stay.
It is a broader destination.
The campaign therefore supported demand across:
This diversified the opportunity.
A person may first discover Grande Provence through a restaurant campaign and later return for accommodation.
Another may visit for wine tasting and later consider the estate for a wedding.
That is the advantage of marketing the destination as a whole, rather than promoting each offering in isolation.
By August 2026, the strategy had moved from theory into measurable business impact.
The client reported:
for Grande Provence.
For us, that bookings and revenue result is particularly meaningful because August sits directly inside the period the original strategy was designed to strengthen.
The objective was low- and shoulder-season growth.
The strongest August in the estate’s history is therefore not a vanity metric.
It is evidence that the commercial strategy achieved what it set out to do.
The next stage of the relationship is also significant.
Following the performance of the strategy, Grande Provence has extended its work with Eco Africa Digital for the foreseeable future and expanded the scope.
The next phase includes:
The focus now shifts from solving one seasonal challenge toward building a stronger long-term digital growth ecosystem.
Grande Provence is a strong example of how the Growth System™ works across the full customer journey.
Google, social media and search content introduced the estate to relevant local audiences.
Seasonal storytelling helped reposition Grande Provence as a destination worth visiting throughout the year.
Paid media, remarketing and direct-response campaigns moved engaged audiences toward bookings.
Email marketing allowed the estate to maintain a direct relationship with its audience.
Multiple estate experiences created opportunities for guests to return and engage with more than one part of the business.
Performance data informed targeting, content and campaign optimisation as the season progressed.
The campaign worked because every part reinforced the same commercial objective.
This was not simply a successful winter campaign.
The strategic work began months earlier.
We identified a seasonal business problem, selected the markets most capable of solving it, repositioned the brand consistently across channels and then used remarketing to convert accumulated demand when it mattered most.
The result was Grande Provence’s strongest August on record.
That is the kind of marketing we believe in:
Start with the commercial problem. Build the strategy early. Execute it consistently. Measure the business outcome.
Tourism seasonality is not always something a business simply has to accept.
Marketing cannot manufacture international arrivals that are not there.
But it can identify the audiences that are available, give them a compelling reason to travel and build demand well before the booking is needed.
For destinations, hotels, estates and attractions with pronounced seasonality, that can create significant commercial opportunity.
A strong low-season campaign does not start when the quiet months arrive.
It starts by building the right demand before you need it.
Share this article
How Grande Provence built demand for the off-season and set a new trading record
Lizanne du Plessis shares the tourism marketing strategies that helped Grande Provence Heritage Wine Estate build off-season demand well ahead of its quieter months, and why the estate went on to report a new August trading record.
Read
ChatGPT Ads Have Arrived in South Africa. Here’s What It Means for African Tourism
October 23, 2026
ChatGPT Ads launched in South Africa and Kenya on 21 October 2026. Here’s who can advertise, how to reach UK, European and US travellers, and when ChatGPT Ads can outperform Google and Meta for tourism.
Read
From SEO to GEO: What Tourism Brands Need to Know in the Age of AI
June 25, 2026
Eco Africa Digital CEO Lizanne du Plessis shares insights from her CNBC Africa interview on generative engine optimization, AI search, smart content and the future of tourism marketing in Africa.
Read
