How to find your destination’s target audience with D / AI Destinations

Analysing visitor origins, behaviours, and preferences is essential for accurately defining the target audience of a tourist destination, allowing for better focus when planning services, offers, and promotional campaigns.

Defining and attracting the right target audience for a tourist destination goes beyond marketing, popularity, and profits. Today, sustainability is just as important—if not more so—encompassing social, cultural, and environmental aspects.

Fully understanding the target audience is key to making informed decisions on:

• Attracting the right visitors at optimal times of the year to help effectively manage overcrowding
• Providing valuable experiences for both tourists and residents
• Developing effective marketing strategies
• Collaborating with stakeholders to design offerings that resonate with the audience
• Creating events, festivals, or fairs that align with audience preferences
• Making informed decisions on allocating investments in new services and infrastructure

Understanding the origins, spending habits, behaviours, and preferences related to accommodation and travel choices is crucial for accurately profiling your buyer personas.

But how can you quickly gather this data? How can you track it and monitor if and how it changes over time and throughout the year?

The D / AI Destinations platform for destination marketing and management provides a wealth of real-time data to accurately profile both current visitors and those you should focus on in the future.

Let’s explore the types of data available and how to make the most of this information.

Where your visitors come from, the languages they speak, and who they are travelling with

A crucial first step in clearly understanding the profile of both current and potential tourists is to consider their origin, spoken language, and type.

Analysing reviews, along with data on booked and searched GDS flights, provides a comprehensive view of the markets interested in your destination.

The “Destination” module presents essential information in a single screen, offering insights not only into the travellers who have already chosen your destination but also into emerging markets that you might want to focus on in the future:

• Origin: distribution of digital footprints and average sentiment based on travellers’ origin
• Type: distribution among couples, families, groups, solo travellers, and business travellers, along with their corresponding sentiment
• Languages spoken: breakdown of digital footprints by language

If you want a complete overview of the preferences and behaviours of a specific type of tourist, such as American couples or German families, all you need to do is set the right filters.

The “Flights” module, divided into “Searches” and “Bookings,” is an excellent tool for anticipating trends.

For example, below you can see GDS flight searches to Brazil for the next 12 months.

We can observe a significant rise in searches from certain countries, particularly the UK and Italy, compared to the previous year. This information serves as a valuable indicator for determining where and how to target your upcoming promotional campaigns, given the growing interest from these travellers.

There are also additional useful data points in this module that can enrich the visitor profile, such as:

• The booking window, to understand how far in advance people book based on their country of origin
• The average trip length
• The flight class booked

Visitors’ accommodation choices and their spending preferences

The “OTA Focus” and “Destination” modules help you track booking trends and rates on major travel sites, separating hospitality from short-term rentals. You can also compare current data with that from previous months or years.

This module provides valuable insights into travellers’ choices:

• What type of accommodation do they choose?
  Private property or hotel, countryside retreat or five-star hotel? Entire apartment or private room? For each type of accommodation, you can view subcategories along with their sentiment score (i.e., level of satisfaction) and the number of reviews.

• How much are visitors willing to spend?

By viewing the minimum, average, and maximum rates and their trends over time, you can understand the price sensitivity of tourists for each period of the year.

• In which areas do people want to stay?

A convenient map with accommodation sector points of interest shows the distribution across the region and indicates where OTA saturation is higher or lower. In other words, it shows where accommodations have higher or lower occupancy levels.

Try out D / AI Destinations for effective destination management

Behaviours, preferences, and interests

Analysing Points of Interest (POIs) is essential for understanding tourist behavior in a specific area.

A POI refers to any location that attracts people, such as hotels, restaurants, venues, monuments, and museums.

On D / AI Destinations, you can explore the number, distribution, and reviews of both individual POIs and their broader categories and subcategories:

• F&B: bars, restaurants, ice cream parlours, etc.
• Hospitality: hotels, B&Bs, campgrounds, etc.
• Short-term Rentals: rented rooms and vacation homes, etc.
• Attractions: museums, monuments, galleries, parks, etc.
• Transportation: gas stations, airports, parking lots, etc.

This will show you the most frequented and highly reviewed places and areas in the city.

This information is useful not only for understanding how people move around the area but also for identifying lesser-known areas worth promoting to diversify the offerings and prevent overcrowding in the city centre.

For each sector, you can also discover the most discussed topics online and their respective sentiment.

Through this analysis, you’ll pinpoint both the most praised and the most criticised aspects by travellers, guiding you on where to invest and make improvements, whether in services or infrastructure.

This information is also useful for clearly understanding people’s expectations and whether the destination is meeting them or not.

Why and when travellers visit destinations for concerts, fairs, and festivals

People are increasingly travelling not just to visit a location, but to participate in events.

And they’re prepared to make intercontinental journeys, whether it’s to watch football matches, attend Formula 1 races, or see international artists perform.

That’s why it’s crucial to understand the composition and behaviour of visitors who arrive for major events.

In D / AI Destinations, the “Events” module is designed specifically for this purpose: to anticipate and understand who will arrive during an event, how it will impact bookings and tourism spending, and whether it will make certain areas more crowded.

From this module, you can check the expected attendance and sales for concerts, sports matches, fairs, and more up to 180 days in advance. You can also measure how each event affects area saturation and OTA rates, as well as its impact on surrounding POIs.

When it comes to events, the composition of visitors to the destination can change significantly, and this information is useful for optimising hospitality, services, and planning promotional activities.

The crucial role of data in promoting responsible tourism

The data we’ve reviewed are valuable tools for creating an accurate picture of your target audience, as well as for reflecting on the type of tourist destination you want to build.

Data allows us to move away from generic mass tourism and instead focus on more personalised and thoughtful travel experiences.

This shift in perspective can lead to significant benefits:

• A better experience for visitors
• A more positive impact on local communities
• More sustainable management of environmental and cultural resources
• A fairer distribution of tourist flows across the region
• More effective planning of investments in the sector

The future of tourism lies in the ability to balance the needs of visitors with those of destinations.

Only by thoroughly understanding the needs and impacts on all stakeholders—supported by detailed data and accurate analysis—can we create a tourism system that thrives in the long term and benefits everyone involved.