Doing Data Better for Tourism: Event Recap

Why being more strategic about your data makes business sense

The need for relevant and timely data

It’s not always easy to know what data we should be looking at, how to access it, how it compares to our competitors, if we’re interpreting it in the right way or using the right tools or metrics. Who are our customers? Where can we find them on digital channels? What do they want from our products and services? What are they saying about us?

Data for decision-making

Now, more than ever, we need to understand as much as we can about our tourism customers and visitors and how they behave, to be able to respond to them accordingly, and to engage with them in timely, effective and efficient ways. The right data and how we use it can help us in the tourism recovery process and in our quest to ensure sustainable tourism.

Our Traveltech for Scotland event, Doing Data Better for Tourism, on Wednesday 27 October, addressed our tourism and hospitality data challenges, with four different perspectives that we believe tourism businesses and organisations found useful.

Industry perspectives are important

Brendan Miles of The List talked about why live events data is important to tourism, the state of the live events industry between 2019, now and where it’s going. We found out how The List collects live events data, then and now, and how that data is used by different sectors, such as hotels, transport and destinations.

Sam Rhynas of Effini talked about how SME’s can start making best use of their data, why businesses need a data strategy and where things can go wrong. Sam helped us understand the key principles of what a data strategy is, ‘do’s and don’t’s’, and offered examples of how organisations have carried out successful data projects.

Diego Acuña of The Data Appeal Company, shared how the company uses real-time traveller behaviour data, including a real-life destination example, to empower tourism operators in destinations to embrace a data-driven strategy and see through the eyes of visitors; in order to improve the overall visitor experience of the destination.

Alistair Carty of Wilderness Insights demystified sensor technology, share what information sensors can obtain and what insights they can provide. He also helped us understand what data management is required to maximise value from sensor data, when to use and not use sensors, and showed how sensor data can transform understanding and drive positive action.

Doing Data Better Event, Wednesday 27 October

If you missed our event on the 27 October you can watch the video recap here.

Follow Traveltech for Scotland or sign up for our fortnightly newsletter.