Tourism Data

What is tourism data?

Tourism data provides comprehensive information about the travel and tourism industry, international tourism, and domestic tourism. It includes transaction-level information such as tourism expenditure on flights, car rentals, mode of transport, hotel stays, restaurant visits, and visits to attractions. It also include data on inbound tourism as well as outbound tourism. 

Where does the data come from?

The largest provider for this data is the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), which focuses on sustainable development and accessible tourism. The UNWTO provides global tourism data for several prior decades, tracking the tourism sector including international tourist arrivals, departures, and total spending.

Several other public and private service providers also collect tourist data covering public and private transport companies. The hospitality industry depends on tourism, and hotels, restaurants, QSR, facility providers, and tourist attraction management companies contribute to this data.

Financial institutions, insurers, and banks also track spending on travel and tourism, including its share of total exports.

What types of attributes should I expect?

The typical attributes of tourism data include:

• Domestic and foreign arrivals and departures
• The capacity and demand for accommodations
• Traveler expenditures
• The number of local residents working in the industry
• National revenue generated from the industry (economic impact)
• Seasonal or unique events that affect regional and global tourism
• Tourism employment

How should I test the quality of the data?

Tourism data tends to come in large volumes, and some data sources may not provide updated or accurate data. While you need diverse sources to contribute to the database, data consistency can become an issue. Relying on official sources such as UNWTO, regional or national ministries, and border control can ensure validity and accuracy of data.

You need to test the source credibility and data quality to guarantee that your analysis delivers trusted insights.

To test the quality of the data:

• Ensure that the data is regularly updated, consistent, complete, and accurate.
• Validate the source credibility, especially when the sources are not the official sources of tourism statistics.

Who uses tourism data?

All types of industries use this data when planning for business travel or hotel booking.

Tourism companies use it for planning and pricing. They use insights from the data to anticipate demand and launch advertising campaigns for specific locations. Along with different types of demographic data, they use tourism information to target different population segments. Travel intent helps forecast future travel volume and expenditure. Trends in the tourism and hospitality industry enable hotels, travel companies, or flight operators to anticipate and address tourist needs.

Government institutions use this information for funding, tourism development initiatives, infrastructure planning, and worker benefits decisions. Even if you are not in the tourism industry, you can leverage tourism data to assess how your business can benefit from the industry trends.

What are the common challenges when buying this type of data?

Tourism data needs to reflect the most current information as it drives the marketing and pricing strategy. This data is also useful in competitive analysis. Its completeness and accuracy is critical. The major challenges associated with purchasing the data are outlined below. 

• Data recency:  The data must be up-to-date in order to drive meaningful insights. If it is obsolete, the result can negatively impact planning and profits. As the data is collected from various sources, ensuring that you always get the most recent data is one of the biggest challenges.
• Data accuracy: Inaccurate data can deliver skewed results, impacting marketing strategies and campaigns. Accuracy of the popular locations, consumer spending, and other attributes of tourism data plays a significant role in delivering the best ROI on marketing investments. 
• Data completeness and consistency: Data arriving from different sources may not present complete and consistent information about tourist activities. Given the high volume of tourism data available and how quickly it evolves, assessing it and ensuring its consistency can be challenging.
• Privacy compliance: If the data includes personally identifiable information (PII), it must comply with the relevant region-specific privacy regulations.

What are similar data types?

Some similar data types are intent data,  travel booking data, hotel pricing data, tourism transaction data, and other related demographic data categories.

You can find a variety of examples demographic and consumer data in the Explorium Data Catalog.

What are the most common use cases?

Tourism analytics provides actionable insights used in travel intelligence, competitor analysis, price monitoring and optimization, as well as other related use cases in the travel and tourism industry. 

Other industries may use tourism data for their travel requirements.

You can also leverage tourism data to enrich other types of consumer demographic data for relevant use cases in your industry.

• Competitor analysis: Businesses use several data categories to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors. Based on the insights, they strategize on opportunities and threats in the market. Service providers operating in the tourism, travel, hospitality, and entertainment industries use tourism data for data-driven competitor analysis.
• Price monitoring and optimization: The tourism industry has its own unique challenges and is driven by constantly balancing demand with capacity. Tourism data helps companies monitor product and service pricing across multiple channels, evaluating how consumers respond. Pricing optimization leverages competitor and market pricing data to determine the right price for maximizing profit.
• Marketing and advertising campaign strategy: Tourism data provides information about popular destinations, preferred price bands, and consumer response to campaigns. These insights are leveraged for strategizing marketing and advertising campaigns for the projected revenue.
• Destination intelligence: Insights derived from tourism data about destination locations are used for tourism packages, travel and hotel pricing, and infrastructure planning.

Which industries commonly use this type of data?

Travel, tourism, and hospitality industries use this type of data regularly. Related industries such as apparel, retail, automotive, telecom, entertainment may also use this data to benefit from the insights and trends. Financial institutions, insurance providers, and banks also use this data to design specific products targeted at travelers and tourists.

All other industries such as manufacturing, hi-tech, or CPG use tourism data while planning business travel.

How can you judge the quality of your vendors for tourism data?

The tourism data vendors provide large volumes of data collected across several sources. You can judge the vendor quality based on their ability to deliver consistent, timely, and accurate data at scale. Interacting with vendor reps and getting demos can help you assess their capability to match your requirements.

• Interacting with vendor reps: Vendor reps can provide detailed information and respond to queries, assisting in the decision-making process. Such interactions can help to evaluate vendor commitment and credibility, and open up discussions about custom requests or additional quality testing. 
• Demo: Many vendors provide a detailed demo to establish their quality and range of data categories. You can also request a sample dataset to test the quality and suitability of data for your use case.
• Case studies and customer reviews: Reviews and testimonials from customers help you assess if the vendor quality meets your expectations. Case studies demonstrate how the vendor engages to meet specific challenges. Most of the vendor websites carry customer reviews, or you can ask for customer references.