Time2marketing interview: how predictive analysis support destination marketing

In tourism destinations, in particular if they are characterised by a strong seasonality and by international tourism flows, decision makers often rely on traditional statistic systems, such as the number of visits to a web portal or on forecasting models based on historical data.

Twissen commented the data concerning a sample of about 60.000 researches done during the last month (30th of April – 29th of May) with Nicola Grassetto, Founder & C.E.O. of Time2marketing. The data were collected through the destination portals’ booking engines of a part of the Veneto’s Adriatic coast called Obere Adria. The study focused on the coastal area of Bibione, Caorle and Cavallino Treporti, popular sea&sun destinations, and in particular on the researches by Italian and German tourists.
The business intelligence tool used for the analysis allows local tourism operators, such as DMOs, tourism consortium and trade associations, to know in real time the tourists preferences, through the analysis of the researches on the booking engine on the destinations portals.
Grassetto describes these activities as “the tool that allows us to analyse in real time the demand of the users who are interested in a certain destination, to know which typology of accommodation they’re looking for, in which period, the length of their stay, the number of people travelling in the family and, in particular, the conversion rate of bookings. This figures are strategically important for promotional policies of destinations and allow the destination managers to know tourists’ wishes and expectations, in order to design products, advertisement and solutions able to satisfy them. This tool was designed by Time2marketing thanks to the integration of the booking engine (BookingFor®), used by the several destination portals, and the platform Google Analytics® through its Beta tool called DataStudio®”.

In the light of the analysed sample, the most requested week resulted to be the 22nd of the year, namely the week which includes an Italian national holiday and the beginning of the Pentecost, registering about 10.000 researches.
As underlined in the following figure, the most researched weeks, apart from the 22nd are, by now, the 31st and the 32nd, namely the first two weeks of August. The most researched tourism service is apartment, recording almost 30.000 researches or bookings, followed by hotels or camping parks.

Source: Time2marketing

In specific, in the considered period, Italian tourists researched or booked, in order, the 22nd, 31st and the 32nd, while German tourists the 22nd, the 23rd and the 24th. Moreover, Italians researched almost 12.000 times apartments and 7.000 times hotels, while Germans 14.000 apartments and 11.000 hotels.  The following figure underlines the 10 most requested products by nation.

Source: Time2marketing

Going into the detail of the researches done in the aforementioned period, it is interesting to observe the travel habits of the different segments. Initially, it is notable that the major part of the potential tourists researched an accommodation for 4 people, followed by groups of 2 and 3 people.

Source: Time2marketing

Italian tourists mostly travel in 4 people (about 7600 researches), in 3 (about 7250) and 2 (about 7200). Also German tourists travel in 4 people (about 10.000), in 2 (about 8900) and 3 (about 6200).

Regarding the length of the holiday, the major part of tourists researched 7 days stays (about 25.000 researches), followed by 14 days (12.000) and 3 days (6.000).

At Twissen we observed that the sea&sun product has still excellent performances, in spite of some evolutions of the travel habits of target tourists. These need to be constantly monitored, both at destination and at single enterprise level, in order to support quick and efficient decisions. In fact, the use and processing of data is becoming a strategic activity to develop in every tourism organisation and is becoming more and more a point of competitive advantage.

—-

Time2marketing is a consulence marketing agency which provides services in web. It analyses, plans and developsonline communication campaigns at an international level for tourism destinations and facilities.

Twissen