Why Forward-looking Demand Intelligence is all the More Important for a Destination and it’s DMO Today?

The past few years of Covid 19 haven’t discriminated between people, industries, or geographies. After disrupting most of the global economy, the pandemic now seems to be easing a bit, thus putting businesses back on a trajectory of recovery. Nonetheless, challenges remain aplenty.

Today, we shift our focus to Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs), Convention & Visitor Bureaus (CVBs), and Destination Management Companies (DMCs).

From a travel and destination tourism standpoint, DMOs, CVBs, and DMCs play a crucial role in promoting and driving visitors to a location, making it an attractive tourist destination and consequentially bringing in revenues.

Data Acquisition Challenges faced by DMOs

DMOs haven’t had it easy with the pandemic.

Due to the lingering uncertainty of travel recovery, gauging segments and source markets that are likely to recover faster is harder than ever. Traditionally, all the required information for demand forecasting was sourced from historical data and high-level travel trends.

However, all historical data available currently for the past couple of years has been skewed, marred with tourism coming to a standstill during the pandemic. Even current travel behavior is hard to predict, with recovery patterns being volatile and easily influenced by current events that could disrupt travel – Omicron for example.

Without the knowledge of where the travellers are coming from, what is their profile, what are the popular areas a traveler would like to visit, the kind of accommodation they are looking for and how much they are willing to spend, it becomes difficult for DMOs to come up with actionable plans to drive footfalls.

Thus, there is a strong need for accurate, forward-looking, granular, and actionable intelligence that can help DMOs/DMCs to bring in better revenues.

Anticipating Demand through reflexive Artificial Intelligence

DMOs need to understand and take into consideration a number of factors while planning a course of action to drive footfalls. Here are some of the top defining factors:

• • Understanding the type of travelers expected in the next 6 months, then estimating how long the booking window is in terms of the potential traveler searching for places to visit and eventually booking for his/her desired destination.
  • Identifying the source countries, cities, airlines, and passenger types (business/leisure, etc.) that are driving traffic to the city. Simultaneously, there’s a need to keep an eye on how and where other competitor destinations are getting the demand from.
  • Determining the Length of Stay (LOS), Location of Stay, Booking Window, Average Daily Rates (ADRs), and Number of Travellers to better identify demand trends.
  • Analyzing Keyword and Search Data for better user profiling and identification of their preferred local activities during the course of their stay.
  • Tracking local events, occurrences, and current affairs to identify potential sources of demand.

However, barely aggregating this data on the surface level doesn’t help. DMOs need precise and accurate data which is the result of intense analysis. Such granular industry insights can be obtained in a better way using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AI-assisted solutions.

RateGain, a destination marketing company, offers Demand-AI, a proprietary solution to help understand and plan demand forecasts and achieve all this and much more by unlocking key insights aggregated from multiple reliable data sources, thus enabling the DMOs to gauge the parameters driving the trend.

Additionally, it helps highlight the ways the DMOs can run campaigns during low-demand days, to maintain a steady footfall or to raise the footfall at the destination market.

How Demand AI Addresses  dynamic functioning of DMO Marketing Through Forward Looking Data?

DMOs usually have a massive task cut out in order to bring in increased footfall to the destination city. This includes getting newer brands to the destination, improving physical public infrastructure such as roadways, jogging and cycling tracks, adventure parks, and recreational spots by working with the lobbies to lay down an effective roadmap.

They also need to look out for emerging markets with high potential to attract travelers, thus facilitating conversions. All these require a huge amount of statistical data to be readily available so that the DMOs can generate more excitement in the source markets through attractive campaigns. The data also helps them review existing campaigns to get the best outcomes.

DMCs often work with car rentals, hotels, and airlines to maximize footfall in the city. They also work with municipal corporations to improve tourist attractions and have a better implementation of events, activities, tours, transportation, and program logistics.

DMCs often work with car rentals, hotels, and airlines to maximize footfall in the city. They also work with municipal corporations to improve tourist attractions and have a better implementation of events, activities, tours, transportation, and program logistics.

Such a diverse array of functions needs constant and dynamically updated data. RateGain, a destination marketing organization, offers Demand-AI, a product powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning. RateGain’s Demand Forecasting and Planning Solution provides source market intelligence based on actual travellers.

Additionally, it offers insights on dates with peak demand and the persona of the expected travelers. Armed with such precise data, DMOs and DMCs can plan their acquisition campaigns with greater clarity, leading to better output.

Knowing where exactly the traveler is staying helps DMOs predict future demand in the sub-districts of such locations, and Demand-AI has a solution for that too. The hyperlocal demand index feature provides data on where travelers are headed to within a city for the next 75 days.

Lead-time planning and analysis, another important component in the DMOs arsenal also finds a simplified solution within Demand-AI with data on google searches, bookings, airlines, and hotels showing up for advanced seasonal planning. This data can be used to compare alternate destinations to gauge the demand trend too.

Events play a crucial role in determining the demand for a particular destination. These events could range from concerts, workshops, festivals, public holiday celebrations, sports, theatre, and a lot more. Event intelligence can help identify what kind of events drive travel to a particular destination, how popular these events are, how often do they recur, which pockets in the city are likely to witness an increased demand etc.

Demand-AI’s consists of a large data lake stemming from RateGain data aggregated from billions of data points on searches, rate shopping data and bookings from over 300,000+ hotels, 200+ airlines, 50+ OTAs, and vacation rentals globally. DMOs can leverage this strength alongside Demand-AI’s collection of forward-looking demand indicators such as active COVID cases, vaccination numbers, lockdowns/restrictions news, events, weather, airline capacity, and bookings to generate a forecast using AI, that is refreshed on a weekly basis.

This forecast report helps identify future travel demand for over 50 major cities across the globe for a period of 75 days in advance, with the dates having the highest demand highlighted for easy analysis. Competition Market share from particular source markets can also be tracked to help DMOs identify the other destinations travelers are flying to.

DMOs can obtain country-level and city-level intelligence for some of the most important and prominent cities and countries in advance for a period of 90 days. By deep-diving into insights that matter, such as the type of airline and aircraft, the traveler segment, and the arrival time and terminal information, DMOs can prepare a detailed plan of action that can help boost revenues.

How DMOs can benefit through Demand-AI

As the industry’s first AI-powered demand index and forecasting solution, Demand-AI helps DMOs and DMCs come up with actionable destination development strategies with the help of its forward-looking travel demand insights.

As such, it helps them manage and run source market campaigns, while also opening new doors for business by tying up with source market based DMCs. Arranging local marketing events becomes a breeze as the insights can help develop a targeted communication plan with the appropriate local lingo.

Through event and traveler analysis, the DMOs can predict the length of stay, and compare it with competitor cities to develop better plans. By identifying the traveler’s common areas of interest, they can plan the infrastructure roadmap for the future in-depth, thus making the destination more attractive for future travel.

Armed with demand trends such as high travel dates and low travel dates, it becomes easier to shift marketing gears, adapting to what is required based on demand. By knowing the supply and ADR of hotels, air travel, car rentals, and cruise bookings, DMOs can gauge how pricing fluctuates with predicted demand.

Because DMOs deserve the best data interpretation solutions!

If you are a Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) or a Destination Management Company (DMC), Demand-AI is the resource you need to generate valuable and actionable demand insights to help drive traffic and help destinations thrive.

For an in-depth guide on Demand-AI or to schedule a free demo, get in touch with us here.