Destination Events are returning. How states, cities and neighborhoods are preparing with smarter data strategies

Published on July 13, 2021

With events returning to normal and domestic tourism booming, destination organizations are investing in understanding the recovery and how to make the most of it for their communities. Critical to this is situational data to help them understand what’s happening now, and what’s coming next so they can prepare.

Whether that’s state, county or city governments or destination marketing organizations, all groups working to boost the economic recovery need reliable data to inform their understanding of how their particular location is responding.

The challenge for these organizations is each type of event, each city and each state is recovering at different rates. For example, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York are scheduling more new events than many other cities, but are much earlier in their journey back to 2019 levels, with cities in states such as Texas, Florida and Nevada leading the pack (more info here).

The fragmented and hyperlocal nature of event and economic recovery is another reason why we’re proud of our freshly announced partnership with Zartico, which is transforming the destination marketing organization (DMO) industry by enabling it to make better strategies with data, including our intelligent event data.

Our CEO Campbell Brown caught up with Zartico CEO Sarah Lehman in early July about the opportunities facing DMOs, cities and states as they seek and use data to optimize their local economy and community’s recovery. Key to this is the opportunity to use data to drive alignment and transformational change. Check out the first in a series of videos we will be releasing below:

As Sarah explains in the video, Zartico equips DMOs with insights drawn from a range of data including:

  • Geolocation data to know how people are moving through locations within a DMO and the main attractions.

  • Credit card and spending data to identify how people are spending while they’re within a location.

  • Event data with an impact rank and predicted attendance to inform more accurate predictions and understanding of what is driving people and demand into locations. 

Each of these is powerful insight for DMOs to enable their community to plan for demand better and spend their marketing dollars wisely. And what’s critical for data-driven strategies is that they are explainable and build trust.

Find out more about how events are recovering in the USA, UK and Europe here

Find out more about our partnership with Zartico here.