What real and tangible advantages does Big Data brings for tourism? What are the business opportunities offered by this technology?
As a first consequence, digital transformation and technological advances can radically change the way people consume and get informed. A digital scenario that brings with it new forms of business management. To ensure their survival, all businesses are being forced to adapt to the online environment.
Tourism sector is not an exception. The data analysis benefits tourism in all its areas, exploiting its possibilities and presenting new business opportunities.
The implementation of Big Data in tourism means having real-time information about users, their movements and their preferences.
Information about the movement of individual travelers, their buying preferences, their aspirations… these data, if correctly treated, represents a huge advantage for companies in the tourism sector which now have the opportunity to define and optimize their strategies to increase their sales.
The online activity of tourists provides macro data that delivers a better picture of their behavior. Because of that, studies based on surveys or interviews with experts, lacking the necessary objectivity to get conclusive answers on the real situation of tourism now belong in the past.
In particular, this technology allows to gather some parameters which make possible to improve the services, the decision making process and the management of tourism businesses.
Parameters such as the number of visitors, as well as where they come from; the average time people stay according to their nationalities; what are the most common trips in the cities; places preferred by tourists to spend the night; or average expenditure.
What Does Big Data Contribute to Tourism?
Compared to traditional methods, data analytics provides six important advantages:
Reliability
The data extracted with the Big Data application are based on actual consumer actions and not on data obtained from surveys, predictions or projections. Therefore, the results obtained are objective, not valuations subjected to different interpretations.
