The Data Appeal Company is revolutionizing tourism destinations with Sentiment-based Location Intelligence

How does an organization leverage a variety of datasets enriched by artificial intelligence (AI) to provide unique, impactful solutions for the tourism, hospitality and retail industries. Meet The Data Appeal Company – the innovative data and solutions provider combining big data with sentiment, footfall, and market trends to power optimized performance and drive real results for destination marketing organizations (DMOs), convention and visitors bureaus, tourism boards, and more.

Headquartered in Florence, Italy, and founded in 2014, The Data Appeal Company (formerly Travel Appeal) has since grown to over 50 teammates serving more than 2,500 clients across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Australia. The tech innovator combines several datasets to provide a complete 360° overview of any territory, its competitors, visitors and local businesses. They analyze, measure and benchmark performance though a unique combination of:

• Points of Interest (POI) and Places Data 

• Business Information 

• Customer Sentiment

• Footfall & Popularity 

• Flights

• Hotel Rates & Prices

Joining these data sets together powers unique, real-time data analysis tools that help these companies uncover deeper business insights and make better decisions based on data analysis. 

The Data Appeal Company's latest products have been developed to assist all professionals in various sectors from the corporate to local level, and include D A/I Destinations, a location intelligence platform that combines AI and big data to help tourism destinations analyze and benchmark operator performance and visitor behavior and preferences.

Managing data from past events is essential to accurately identify visitor profiles and understand their motivations for traveling in order to power actionable insights for their users. As an outcome of integrating PredictHQ’s data, The Data Appeal Company has since been able to improve their clients’ reputation and increase their Sentiment by 7 - 13% on average.

Big data is the key to success in the competitive tourism and hospitality industries 

When it comes to integrating big data, it can be tricky to determine how much is too much. For The Data Appeal Company, bigger is better. As their focus revolves around simplifying and democratizing the data, the more data they can essentially integrate and make as simple as possible for users, the better. 

The Data Appeal Company collects and analyzes data from both points of interest (POIs) and the travel sector in real time and, through an AI system, they transform that data into practical insights. Their D A/I Destinations platform helps tourism destinations, DMOs, and tourism boards around the world better understand their visitors, territories and local businesses with a data-driven approach.  

Event data has always been fundamental for the company from the beginning as a key piece of the puzzle in understanding why people would visit a destination, how long they plan to stay for, and what they are doing while in town. As a global company, it was always important for them to partner with a single provider with reliable, enriched event data from anywhere in the world. 

The Data Appeal Company first began using PredictHQ event data at the start of 2018, back when they were “Travel Appeal”, to help both independent and chain hotel and restaurant operators gain a deeper understanding of their reputation, customer perception, why people were coming into their destinations, and which events have the biggest impact on their territory.

As the company has grown and evolved into The Data Appeal Company, they scaled up from providing HORECA managers with insights into hotels and restaurants, to providing a holistic view of what’s going on on a territory-wide basis for different destinations and retail operators. Integrating intelligent event data into the platform also helps users explain the why behind consumer behavior, and add additional context to visitor profiles. To enable the integration, data was shared via the AWS Data Exchange.

“PredictHQ has immensely helped us add in the event factor. With our data, we already know who the visitors are in any destination (their origin, language and type), when they’re coming, their booking window, and the things that they like to do, where they stay, eat, shop, etc., but we lacked that reason why, to explain what was motivating them. Are travelers there for just a night, the weekend or longer? Are they traveling for business or leisure? Having an understanding of conferences, concerts, sporting events and more has really given us an added insight into the visitor profile. By knowing if your visitors are there on a business trip, on an extended family vacation for public holidays, or couples getaway for a concert, you can leverage this information to better determine visitor motivation and behaviors. When combining these answers with our datasets, the insights are invaluable for destination marketers and managers to design more effective and targeted campaigns and measure ROI.”

Hannah Babineau

Partnerships Manager, 

The Data Appeal Company

In addition to revealing the motivation for fluctuations in event tourism, integrating intelligent event data also supports demand-based pricing for destination marketers and revenue managers who use D A/I Destinations. For example, if users see an influx of arrivals based on flight data in the coming months, they can fully understand the events that are driving this inflow.

Whether it’s a big concert, a popular conference, or even a niche expo driving this influx, users will know to expect an increase in demand and plan accordingly. This can mean anything from increasing nightly rates for hotels during peak demand periods, offering specials at restaurants and attractions to bring more people to their destinations and adjusting staff levels accordingly. 

How event data is integrated into D A/I Destinations

Within D A/I Destinations, impactful events are displayed on a dashboard, which destination managers and marketers use to monitor, manage, and predict demand for their territory more effectively.

D A/I Destinations also includes an events module where users can access a monthly calendar of all upcoming events for the next three months. Each event includes the category (conference, expo, concert, sporting, public holiday, etc.) street address, and Impact Score. 

For each day, Data Appeal has also embedded their hospitality data, which reveals the average price of hotels and the occupancy rate to help users better strategize demand-based pricing and packaging for the upcoming months.

How enriched event data unlocks better campaign planning for DMOs

While The Data Appeal Company had insights into when people are booking their flights, when people are arriving, and what are the top hotels, restaurants and retail shops that they visit, segmented by visitor origin, type and language, while in town – what was missing was insight into the motivating factor that’s driving them, whether it be a concert, sporting event, or other event category.

When it comes to major tourism-driving events, it’s important for users to know about these events in advance to power campaigns around the occasion. With an understanding of how the event will impact an entire territory, individual operators are also able to leverage these insights to align with incoming levels of demand for the region, and for their individual businesses. Intelligent event data reveals: 

• Predicted event attendance and impact

• How long do people plan to stay for 

• Other impactful events nearby that may be compounding demand for hotel, restaurant, and retail operators within the region

Integrating these data points into their D A/I Destinations platform powers users’ ability to:

• Adjust staffing levels to prevent being over or understaffed, and to avoid costly overtime pay

• Ensure the right amount of inventory to prevent waste and meet customer demand

• Optimize dynamic pricing to maximize revenue during peak periods of demand

Results

The Data Appeal Company saw a 7 - 13% increase in visitor sentiment.

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By integrating PredictHQ event data, the Data Appeal Company saw a 7 - 13% improvement in visitor sentiment on average.

Integrating intelligent event data has resulted in a significant improvement for customer sentiment for certain destinations. For example, The Data Appeal Company works with VisitPiemonte, a DMO of the region in Northern Italy whose main competitor is the Bordeaux region in France – a big wine territory.

For them, understanding the wine events taking place in their region helps them increase sentiment by creating event-based travel and hotel packages intended to target tourists interested in visiting the region for these events. The data answers questions such as where they’re traveling from? Are visitors coming from the UK, the US, or from France? Or are they domestic travelers? This informs how to position messaging, what language to use, and how to appeal to these audiences.

Understanding who is coming to that destination and the impact that events might have had led them to increase their sentiment on average by 7 to 13 points more than their competitors.

The Data Appeal Company's innovative approach to combining big data with sentiment, footfall, and more is revolutionizing the tourism and hospitality industries. By integrating PredictHQ event data into D A/I Destinations, their destination analysis platform, Data Appeal has enabled destination managers, revenue managers, and marketers to better understand their visitors' motivations and behaviors, and to plan more effective campaigns – to the right audience, with the right message, at the right time – to target event attendees. 

PredictHQ makes it easy for AWS Travel & Hospitality customers to leverage third-party data in the cloud, by delivering it through Amazon S3 data objects, APIs or Amazon Redshift queries directly to their data lakes, applications, analytics, and machine learning models – all via the AWS Data Exchange. To get started, simply search for them on AWS Marketplace.

For more information on how PredictHQ leverages AWS, please click here. For more information about Data Appeal's D A/I Destinations platform, click here.