Real-time and Historical Terror Events Added to PredictHQ

Published on October 11, 2016
Campbell Brown
CEO & Co-Founder

Real-world occurrences which impact businesses

As the world leader in Demand Intelligence, PredictHQ is committed to providing the ultimate platform for event visibility. This means tracking as many real-world occurrences which can impact businesses around the globe. From natural disasters, concerts, conferences, sports through to school holidays and public holidays, we now support 15 major real-time and scheduled event categories – and counting.

The 15th category we have released within our API is Terror events. This included historical terror attacks as well as real-time. Like our other real-time categories, severe weather, natural disasters and airport delays provide businesses with event intelligence around negatively impacting events. Our terror category has been widely requested by our users and whilst a devastating reality, we believe it is necessary to ensure businesses have this type of visibility.

You can now also view event detail pages without having to be logged in with the release of Public Event Pages:

  • Boston Bombing – 15th April 2013

  • Paris Attacks – 13th November 2015

  • New York Bombing – 17th September 2016

How are terror events impacting specific sectors like travel & tourism?

One of sectors to feel the largest impact from recent terror events is travel & tourism.  As Rochelle Turner, the Research Director from WTTC points out, it creates a shift in destination versus a decrease in numbers: “The world has seen many terrorist attacks over the last year and whilst these attacks are utterly tragic, travellers have shown to be very resilient. Overall our data has shown us that people do not stop travelling but rather they change destinations. In 2015, despite some unfortunate and high profile terror events in popular tourist destinations, Travel & Tourism grew by 3.1%, outperforming global economic growth for the 5th consecutive year, and we expect the same growth for 2016.”

Turner also points out that the impact and subsequent recovery is varied: “The impact terrorism has on Travel & Tourism and the recovery of a country’s visitor numbers is dependent on a variety of factors, including; the stability in the country; whether the attack was aimed at tourists; and the government response. As an example, countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey will suffer in the medium term (2 – 3 years), while we expect cities like Paris and Brussels to see a short term impact (6 – 9 months).”

Adapting to changing markets

Ensuring your business has visibility of these negative forces which can change a market’s dynamic is critical in being able to adapt quickly, efficiently and appropriately. Understanding the impact can also help your business better plan for if a similar event occurs again. Whether it’s improving duty of care or preempting and effectively mitigating a decrease in revenue.

Now that historical and real-time Terror events are within our global event data feed, they are included in our Event Signals functionality which not only shows positive events which could impact your business but also negative events.

More to come

We have more planned releases which will further improve the depth and breadth of our event intelligence. Some of these will be related to the enrichment of our event data and others will be new event categories such as public health warnings and political events.

If there is any specific requests or ideas you have then please don’t hesitate to contact us.