New online ‘Tourism Indicator’ dashboards support business decisions

Making data-driven business decisions has never been easier, thanks to the new online tourism indicator dashboards released this week on Travel Alberta’s Industry Hub and the Tourism Industry Association of Alberta (TIAA)’s website.

Developed in partnership with TIAA, the dashboards provide comprehensive data from cross-industry sources. Having numerous data sets available in one place makes timely, relevant data accessible for everyday use – distilled into easy-to-understand, downloadable visuals.

The new online dashboards replace Travel Alberta’s previously published monthly report. Instead of the formerly static datasets that provided information at a specific point in time, the new dashboards show trends over time, affording the ability to define data by market, airport and other context.

The first release includes the following dashboards:

• economic impact
• visitor spend
• visitation
• visitor characteristics
• hotel performance
• air access
• air passengers   
• potential market size    

APPLICABLE INSIGHTS

Tourism businesses, communities and industry partners can use these insights to better understand the industry and identify growth opportunities. The ability to layer destination data onto data from your business provides rich information to enhance your business and operational planning. For example:

• Comparing year-over-year growth to understand potential regional tourism in peak vs. slow seasons
• Aligning pricing with regional or seasonal market trends
• Tailoring promotional messaging, marketing and spend to key tourism markets

By understanding Alberta’s visitor economy and visitor segments, communities can specifically tailor programming to the most promising and impactful markets.

Air access tracks the planned number of seats on direct flights into Alberta and where these flights are coming from. This is important because increasing direct flights to Alberta’s two major airports from priority markets makes the province more competitive as a business and leisure destination.

USER TIP: Understand how many potential travellers visit Alberta in a given month and where they’re coming from to support your operational planning.

Visitation characteristics like past visitor spending and trip length can help you understand which tourism markets include high-value travellers – visitors more likely to spend more per visit, yield the highest return on investment, and make the greatest contribution to business revenue and economic growth in Alberta .

USER TIP: Attract valuable visitor markets by tailoring products and experiences to their unique travel styles. See Alberta’s Ultimate Travellers for in-depth traveller personas developed using this and other visitation data.

As more tourism data is generated around the province every day, this is an ongoing project that reflects the most up-to-date data available. The scope and number of dashboards will continue to grow as more datasets are added, so be sure to check back for updates often!