Data spaces are emerging as a critical component of the digital economy, facilitating the secure and efficient sharing of data across organisations.
Data spaces are emerging as a critical component of the digital economy, facilitating the secure and efficient sharing of data across organisations. By enabling data-driven decision-making and fostering transparency, data spaces empower businesses to gain valuable insights and support the development of innovative solutions. As the volume and complexity of data continue to grow, data spaces will play an increasingly important role in tourism's green and digital transformation.
Data spaces are emerging as a critical component of the digital economy, facilitating the secure and efficient sharing of data across organisations. By enabling data-driven decision-making and fostering transparency, data spaces empower businesses to gain valuable insights and support the development of innovative solutions. As the volume and complexity of data continue to grow, data spaces will play an increasingly important role in tourism's green and digital transformation.
Data spaces are emerging as a critical component of the digital economy, facilitating the secure and efficient sharing of data across organisations. By enabling data-driven decision-making and fostering transparency, data spaces empower businesses to gain valuable insights and support the development of innovative solutions. As the volume and complexity of data continue to grow, data spaces will play an increasingly important role in tourism's green and digital transformation.
The tourism sector has a wealth of data and insights at its disposal. Marketers now have access to extensive volumes of data, which can be harnessed using a diverse range of tools to build and integrate marketing metrics in granular detail. Platforms like Funnel and Supermetrics help in this process. However, the sheer volume of data and the way it is shared creates challenges, with a desire for marketers to interrogate raw data in more detail.
DMOs with big research departments produce lots of reports, which often end up sitting on a shelf and remaining underutilised. The format of data sharing is a friction point, with marketers underestimating the time it takes to organise data, leaving too little time to analyse. While DMOs can collaborate with universities on data analytics, for example by giving dissertation students data to work with, this level of collaboration can be "hit and miss", with modelling based on incorrect assumptions. When following this approach, DMOs need to be a core part of the process and questions arise around who should lead projects.
It is also becoming increasingly difficult to find people who can effectively interpret data. A growing divide in skillsets between older and younger generations has also arisen which can present challenges for data analytics. AI can help bridge the gap between data collection and analysis, but human creativity is still needed for the final step of creating action points. Integrating AI effectively requires a shift in mindset and a willingness to experiment with new approaches. The emergence of Chief AI Officers at many DMOs is a signal that this shift to AI analytics is likely here to stay.
This ambitious strategic shift to view AI as a co-creator can supercharge campaign optimisation through analysing ongoing marketing activities and past performance and identifying areas for improvement. Using AI to quickly research where users are based and the media impact of previous years also helps to ensure efficient allocation of funds for always-on marketing. This data-driven approach empowers marketers to experiment with different strategies, fostering a newfound culture of long-term planning over the more traditional campaign mindset.
By automating the analysis process and uncovering trends that humans might miss, AI can help marketers with the transition of their role to being effective data analysts. Yet, the need for strategic oversight of AI implementation is highlighted by the challenges around AI 'hallucination'. Large Language Models need to be trained with historical reference to derive value as a brand and gain forward looking objectives.
The pressure cooker of marketing often leads to a cycle of lowered expectations, where teams play it safe by setting low targets, highlighting the need for a culture of self-criticism and a willingness to accept challenging answers. Taking more in-house control for reporting and asking strategic questions will achieve the strongest impact because it enables DMOs to move beyond a simple output-focused approach and toward more effective strategies. Yet, reporting metrics often differ due to a patchwork of funding sources, from national governments, local authorities and private entities, and also as a result of fragmentation and silos which exist between and across the sector, despite most DMOs working to the same metrics and shared objectives, highlighting the need for alignment on benchmarking standards to optimise resource efficiency and ensure everyone is working from the same page.
Using data to understand the user journey is crucial for a visitor-centric approach to tourism marketing, focusing on more nuanced questions around brand perception, content strategy and impact. This involves combining data with qualitative analysis to gain a clearer perspective on user flow. Asking intentional questions around user experience and leveraging AI to provide a succinct summary of the main findings enables DMOs to move beyond a simple data-driven perspective to incorporate the human element in decision-making. This is crucial for fostering strategic alignment and identifying what value needs to be created, building clear connections between organisational goals and the tracking of top-level Key Performance Indicators.
Investing in people and teaching creative skills is vital. To assist with this, innovative DMOs are creating prompt libraries to share knowledge and enable employees to achieve high-quality outputs and use the right terminology enhancing data visualisation. AI has the potential to act as a business coach for DMOs who have less resources to transform data into actionable insights.
DMOs often face the dilemma of choosing between standardised data platforms and customised solutions. While standardised data platforms offer a convenient starting point and facilitate comparability, they often fail to provide a comprehensive picture. Social listening is not a perfect tool and there can be a bias due to a lack of transparency about how the data is categorised, making it difficult to translate generic insights into specific strategies.
On the other hand, customised solutions can provide more tailored insights but require significant investment and technical expertise. As such, they work well for joint collaborations between DMOs, with sufficient political backing and enable the regional or national comparison of tourism performance through the same localised indicators that align with core overarching objectives. For example, a pilot project initiated in 2020 had the aim of enabling all companies to benefit from transactional tourist data. Extensive debates around data ownership led to the development of a structured system intended to ensure that everyone could benefit from the insights, providing access to cascading statistics for all users on a national level. With this system now only being integrated, it is immensely clear that the development of customised platforms is a long-term and complex undertaking.
While predictive AI can offer some insights, it can't be solely relied upon. It is important to have a clear strategic direction and prioritise data that is aligned with this overarching vision, with a clear sense of purpose and value creation. The focus should be on diving into specific challenges, requiring pragmatic approaches to the integration of data between different sources.
To ensure successful implementation, it's essential to carefully consider the available tools and the technical compatibility of integrating API connections. Once a suitable platform is selected, a long-term commitment is necessary to fully leverage its potential and avoid costly disruptions. Here is a summary of the benefits and drawbacks of both approaches:
Standardised platforms
Customised platforms
Benchmarking and the creation of data indexes offer a huge potential for competitiveness, enabling the tracking of performance over time. There is a need to be open to sharing data and not see it as confidential, which could create a more level playing field. Performance indexes offer a powerful tool to aggregate diverse datasets, providing a comprehensive overview of tourism demand and destination impact. By consolidating indicators from various sources, such indexes enable simple communication of tourism’s value and contribution to communities. However, the effectiveness of data indexes hinges on the central collation and accuracy and consistency of data collection.
Creating a social tourism index offers DMOs a valuable opportunity to move beyond purely economic measures and gain a more overarching destination management perspective. A tourism impact monitor can show a range of indicators, including ecological and social impacts, helping to demonstrate the value of tourism more effectively. This could also enable DMOs to prioritise enhancing their understanding of local community perspectives, for example when considering extending the tourist season, rather than making assumptions without consulting them. Through such a holistic approach, DMOs can make more informed marketing and branding decisions, which can shift the focus from simply increasing visitor numbers to promoting valued visits and the strategic direction around campaign targeting.
Open data plays a crucial role in promoting sustainability in the tourism industry. By making data accessible, DMOs can increase transparency and accountability, encouraging businesses to adopt sustainable practices. The EU Green Claims directive means that DMOs must go further than simply having a green scheme. The drive for transparency means there is a need to digitise labels to receive more quality indicators that will validate the green scheme, with local DMOs having access to a national information data system. Based on these diverse indicators marketing messages and content preparation can be adapted.
While having access to data is essential, the most important element is effective storytelling. Visitors are uninterested in researching what the labels stand for. With increasing regulation, sustainability is now expected as the norm. Instead of relying on labels, the tourism industry needs to be able to talk about sustainability from the soul, telling a personal story and being authentic. By doing this effectively, sustainability will be implicitly assumed to be integrated across all business functions.
Created for destinations around the world, this programme will provide the insight to help you become a sustainability leader within your organisation.
Designed to teach you how to master must-have tools and acquire essential skills to succeed in managing your destination or organisation, be ready to challenge all of your assumptions.
Designed to teach you how to master must-have tools and acquire essential skills to succeed in managing your destination or organisation, be ready to challenge all of your assumptions.
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