Accessing real-time data about tourists is one of the main desires for every tourism destination, but this is no easy task.
Destination marketing teams and destination managers keep asking questions like:
- Where do visitors come from?
- Where are they heading to?
- How many people should we expect for next season
- What are visitors’ expectations and preferences?
- What do they feel like after their stay?
- Are they satisfied or disappointed?
One of the most famous Italian regions abroad, Emilia Romagna, has faced the same challenges and found an easy and efficient solution. When Pierangelo Romersi joined the DMO VisitEmilia as Director, he immediately realised that the destination suffered two critical issues:
– Get the right data to deeply understand the real perception of visitors of the territory and of the local services to enhance experiences and marketing activities
– Easily access reports and KPIs to demonstrate to partners and stakeholders the effectiveness of the promotional efforts to improve the destination’s progress and competitiveness.
Supercharge official data with real-time big data analysis
VisitEmilia wanted to improve the analysis of the destination’s positioning: official attendance data were reliable, but not enough to detect all the nuances of the industry trends and travellers’ experiences.
Moreover, official data usually is available with a delay of 30-45 days so VisitEmilia needed other kind of data to make rapid and efficient decisions.
Romersi and his team knew they could not underestimate the value of online reviews and content published by people every day about Emilia Romagna, so they chose to partner with D / AI Destinations (former Data Appeal Studio) – The Data Appeal Company all-in-one destination analysis platform.
D / AI Destinations tracks, measures and analyses real-time data from more that 130 sources and provides real-time analysis on visitor demographics, flight and hotels booking, how visitors perceive the destination online and the most appreciated and criticised topics, such as internet connection, staff & hospitality, quality of food, etc. topics.
Nowadays, the destination is in complete control of its public image against competitors and can take concrete institutional and marketing action to improve it.
Data Appeal also provides proprietary, reliable, synthetic scores to immediately understand the quality of travellers’ experience and the overall tourism performances.
- Sentiment Score
- Covid Safety Index
- Travel Barometer
In this way, Visit Emilia can monitor its growth in different aspects, comparing it with previous years’ results or with competitors’ performances.
Providing effective reporting to stakeholders, operators, and governments
No destination is an island: to manage it, DMOs need to train and share results with local operators, public and private partners and stakeholders.
This is crucial to build shared and structured strategies to enhance the destination’s competitiveness.
“The speed of retrieving our data analysis is invaluable – says Romersi. Today, we have a full and accurate picture of the current situation and compare it against previous time periods.
We present this holistic overview to the public and private organizations within the Emilia Romagna region. The insights are indispensable to create strategic actions, set measurable objectives and justify any corrections.”
