A new report by tourism consultancy Acorn T-Stats claims Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) are failing to live up to the challenge of collecting business intelligence.
The UK tourism authorities “use woefully inadequate tools for managing the development of their destinations,” the report claims.
The report was released at last week’s Tourism Management Institute ‘Digital Destinations’ conference and comes as the Government pins its hopes on DMOs delivering its new tourism growth strategy. It is a strategy that sets out requirements for them to be more commercial and competitive.
The report, ‘How to maximise the value of destination Statistics: collecting and sharing data in the age of austerity’, is aimed at research and marketing professionals in UK destination management. It concludes that they can achieve a step change in their marketing programmes by using Web 2.0 technology to integrate data from broad sources, share it with partners, and leverage it commercially.
“The Visitor Economy is the UK’s third largest export worth £115bn. Since the Government is relying on export to drive the UK out of recession, this puts huge pressure onto local tourism authorities,” says the report’s author Kevin Millington.
“The expectation on DMOs to deliver has never been greater; yet their resources have never been fewer. They now need to be lean, agile and responsive, which means having instant access to what is going on, and systems to give them immediate and specific tourism business intelligence.”
The tools currently being deployed by most authorities are from the Dark Ages, says Millington, with the exception of insightful DMOs such as Bath Tourism, Visit Cornwall and Newcastle Gateshead Initiative, which are adapting to new lower cost, more modern methods.
Tourism Research Manager for Newcastle Gateshead Initiative (NGI), Ian Thomas, adds: “I’ve never before had the ability to build a story in any form of reporting without a lot of manual effort to link things together.”
Now, he says, NGI is collecting data from transport providers and retailers and merging it with fuel and energy prices, overlaying web traffic statistics and accommodation occupancy to get real-time business intelligence to help inform on marketing decisions and share with partners. He adds that using an online database is “certainly going to speed up how quickly we can get statistics and trends to the Board which then starts to influence strategic decisions.”
Acorn T-Stats offers five key recommendations for DMOs wanting to maximise the value of their destination statistics:
- Make your data relevant by using locally based statistics
- Capitalise on low-cost online ‘Cloud’ based technology to enable immediacy and sharing
- Ensure reports are generated instantly in real-time and viewed in context
- Share the data with partners
- Combine data source, such as weather, fuel prices, occupancy, travel, to tell an overall story to inform management decisions.
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