ITCMS 2018: TripAdvisor touts its data as answer to tourism resilience challenges

ITCMS 2018: TripAdvisor touts its data as answer to tourism resilience challenges

Global data can inform decisions and assess visitor sentiment Continue reading

Destinations were urged to use data from TripAdvisor to evaluate the impact of crises and become more resilient.

Charlie Ballard, global director of strategic insights at the world’s most visited travel site, said the data it has on millions of users globally can help destinations make better decisions and define what a crisis is and assess its impact on visitor sentiment.

He told the International Travel Crisis Management Summit: “We can aggregate all our data to see patterns in global traffic and essentially act as a benchmark and start to decide what can we do with all this data.

“Crises are going to happen. We are going to see the world of travel impacted in man ways. How can TripAdvisor lend a hand?”

Ballard presented data that suggested the negative impact of recent terror attacks in London, Paris and Barcelona were either negligible or short-lived and he said its data shows no sign of a so-called ‘Trump slump’ in terms of interest among tourists visiting the US. A drop off in search activity was seen in the UK after the 2016 Brexit referendum, Ballard said.

Working with TripAdvisor on data analysis has helped countries like Indonesia promote the importance of making hotels and restaurants safe and welcoming places to visit, Ballard claimed.

He said an awareness campaign in the country resulted in more business owners listing on the site and engaging with reviews which not only led to increased visitor numbers but also a dispersion of tourism from the usual hotspots like Bali.

“We need every destination to become safe and then we need businesses to get online and become visible. We want visitors to go to these destinations and to share their photos and reviews. We need data on this inspirational phase of travel to see if there’s been a change in awareness or intent to travel.”