How has the travel and tourism industry’s use of analytical data evolved over the last decade?
When we started speaking with our prospects over 10 years ago – and specifically DMOs – most of them did not have a ‘data’ budget. Nowadays, every promotion board or Ministry of Tourism’s destination strategy is not only driven by data but also staffed with people capable of getting that data to speak, to provide the right information to C-suite officers, stakeholders and marketers.
In fact, management personnel require that information to do their job these days.
I remember a tourism minister in Europe explaining how information is power, and how our data had changed the relationship the minister had with the rest of the government. By using ForwardKeys’ data, they finally had live information, rather than estimated monthly reports arriving with a one-month delay. In this case, there had been geopolitical tensions between this country and another and as such, they had never been able to measure in real-time, the full-scale impact of geopolitical tensions on (tourism) demand for the destination. With our data, they finally could.