Tourism data management will improve customer experience and optimisation for tourism businesses

Experts gathered at the 'Forum on Tourism Intelligence and Data, keys to Sustainability', held in Benidorm, agree that data allows tourism destinations and businesses to make informed decisions based on knowledge, prepare for what is to come and improve the customer experience.

The forum, which brought together more than 250 professionals from the tourism sector, was organised by the Secretary of State for Tourism in collaboration with the European Commission as part of the events of the Spanish presidency of the Council of the EU.

It was inaugurated by the president of SEGITTUR, Enrique Martínez; the regional secretary for Tourism of the Valencian Community, Cristina Moreno; the deputy assistant director general DG Grow - Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs - of the European Commission, Huber Gambs; and the mayor of Benidorm, Toni Pérez.

At the inauguration, Enrique Martínez highlighted the importance that data has acquired in decision-making, although he stressed the need to know the purpose for which the data is acquired and analysed.

Destinations such as Benidorm and the Basque Country have agreed that tourism intelligence systems help to make decisions in a more optimised way and based on the behaviour of the tourist during the entire life cycle of the trip, although it is essential that the granularity of the data is increased to have more exhaustive information.

For her part, the Executive Director of the World Tourism Organisation, Natalia Bayona, stressed that data is at the heart of tourism technologies, while encouraging Europe not only to be leaders in tourism, but also to be leaders in tourism technology, helping to promote the digitisation of SMEs and data training.

Knowing tourists' preferences

During the event, the European data space projects DATES, led by Anysolution, and Tourism Data Space, led by the Spanish company Forwardkeys, were presented, the benefits of which will be more efficiency and cost savings, an increase in efficiency, a streamlining of processes and access to more and better quality data.

In relation to knowledge of the tourist through data analysis, companies such as Visa, Civitatis and NH believe that this information allows them to know where tourists move, how they behave in destinations and what their preferences are, which allows the destination to plan better and companies to reorient their offer based on the information obtained.

All of them were in firm agreement that data spaces must have an indispensable public leadership, but where shared value has to be created by the public and private sphere, and always selecting data from among data that contributes to achieve a more sustainable tourism.

Non official translation