COVID-19 Economic Response and Recovery
Build Your Data Capacity and Digital Presence
Action:
Build tools and partnerships to help you better understand and boost your online presence with target travelers.
Why:
The pandemic has increased digital screen time. More and more travelers are searching for travel inspiration online, and they increasingly expect technology to provide them with more personal control over their travel experiences.
In a recent poll, 95% of travelers from 28 countries said they spent free time during the pandemic looking for travel inspiration, with 38% looking at potential destinations at least once a week.
This has created opportunities for destinations to use aggregated, anonymized data, and/or to ask travelers for permission to access personal data to personalize marketing campaigns and offerings — which should achieve significantly higher open and click through rates.
Background:
As we adapt to the new reality, destinations need to stimulate and capture the little demand that currently exists, and be ready to capitalize on pent up demand as things return to “new normal.”
Messages and promotions will, therefore, need to be relevant, given the behavior that specific consumers have developed during the pandemic. Has a traveler flown yet? Stayed in a hotel yet? Left their home state yet? Are they nervous to do so? What are their biggest concerns?
Despite consumers saying that they are concerned about the privacy of their personal data, there is plenty of evidence that they are very willing to trade personal information for benefits or rewards — particularly monetary compensation, promotion incentives, and discounts based on their interests, and convenience and speed in using services.
Personalized marketing technology has advanced rapidly in recent year and many brands — from Amazon29 to Target30 — have used behavioral targeting and predictive modelling to take marketing to a whole new level.
Travel and tourism industry examples of data tools to help personalize marketing, target sales, and/or enhance customer service, include:
- London Heathrow Airport’s Connected Spaces project, which enables the airport to better identify, understand, and engage with customers across all touchpoints of the airport.
- Virgin Hotel’s Customer Wi-Fi and Business Intelligence platform, which allows the hotel to acquire new customers, target sales offers, build loyalty with personalized communications, create campaigns based on contextual data, understand customers better through new insights, and refine audience segmentation.
- Singapore National Research Foundation’s Virtual Singapore software, which can analyze visitor movements, with multiple applications for destination management.
- Lufthansa’s Big Data Engine, which allows the airline to offer personal services, as well as upsell to customers.
From our experience, very few cities or DMOs have the resources or know how to imitate leading retail or tourism players.
Fortunately, there are specialist tourism, ad-tech agencies, such as California’s Sojern and Adara, which offer digital travel marketing solutions and can deliver tourism marketing campaigns which microsegment audiences at scale.
Some DMOs, however, do have ambitions to become truly data-driven organizations, by building data solutions specifically for their destinations.
Bloomberg Associates has provided past advice to governments and DMOs which are seeking to understand each visitor — their behaviors and expectations — in order to provide a personalized experience.
It has been our experience that they have often struggled to progress these goals beyond individual marketing campaigns which offer personalize content. This is largely due to aversion to risk, limited technical skills, and/or legacy technology stacks.
Cities and DMOs should, therefore, approach this topic with their eyes open.
Below, we share some principles for DMOs that are thinking to build destination data platforms, which are drawn from our own consulting experience. We have also included, at Appendix 3, an infographic, which shows what an end-to-end data management platform solution could look like.
Case Study
Singapore’s Tourism Analytics Network (Stan)
Singapore’s Tourism Analytics Network (Stan) is an analytics platform for its DMO and tourism organizations, which contains monthly tourism data sets and visualizations.
It was created in 2016 for the Singapore Tourism Board (STB), initially as an internal management tool. The STB subsequently opened it to the general public. The platform contains top line statistics, which are available to the general public, and more in-depth features, which are available to selected industry organizations with a login account. The platform is currently free for all users.
Its data sets and visualizations include:
- Visitor arrivals and seasonality
- Visitor segmentation and demographics
- Visitor spend (what visitors are buying, how much they are spending, what their interests are, etc.)
- Hotel statistics; and
- Visitor satisfaction rates.
The STB uses the platform to understand its visitors and to encourage industry collaboration. It has also developed a self-assessment tool for industry players to diagnose their current state of transformation and provide targeted insights to take action to stay relevant and thrive.
The STB is currently adding new features to the platform, which include:
- A data marketplace for industry players to share and consume tourism-related data; and
- A co-creation space equipped with predictive tools, for industry collaboration on data analytics projects.
How To Adopt This Approach:
Engage a local partner to create, initially, an internal dashboard/insights platform. E.g., Start by talking to your local National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership partner (if you have one), a local university, or community college.
Explore how you can complement existing data sets with third-party (including private sector) data and closer-to-real-time data.
Engage local industry players to understand what insights would help them to thrive.
Recognize that different tourism organizations will have different levels of tech and data literacy, so prioritize a very simple and intuitive user interface.
Distribute the platform for beta testing and get feedback as quickly as possible.
Once your platform has been released, take the time to publicize it and train industry organizations for different use cases. Continue to host training sessions as the product evolves.

Do:
- Do recognize that a data platform, particularly one which enables content personalization, will require money, time, and technical skills. It may also require upgrades to, or the replacement of, your tech stack (e.g., visitor data collection system, CRM, content database, suggestion engine, and visitor communication channels — website, mobile app, chatbot).
- Do talk to your local public transit operator, which may be more advanced, and already using real-time traveler data.
- Do recognize that a solution for a destination will be more complex than a solution for an airport, shopping mall, or hotel. However, the increased return on investment, in terms of reach, engagement and conversion, will
also be significant. - Do engage a specialist database marketing company to build your solution, and do not try to build it on a public sector technology stack.
- Do hire a dedicated project manager who has the technical capability to manage your vendor and oversee its work.
- Do seek a costed menu of options before selecting your preferred solution.
- Do run a pilot for proof of concept and to demonstrate that the expected return on investment is real.
- Do seek legal and policy advice before handling personal data — not just to comply with data protection laws, but also not to adversely affect your government’s/destination’s reputation.
Don’t:
- Don‘t try to turn your DMO into a tech development company, which will never be your core strength.