What is the big thing about Big Data?
What is the big thing about Big Data? Everything! Welcome to the brand new world of data generation and data mining. Big Data is arguably the biggest opportunity, in a generation, for the travel and tourism industry to embrace the changing structure of data and maximize its use. We all know that the Internet has changed our businesses tremendously. How we look, book, pay for and even consume travel services, have changed dramatically. With that change has come entire new ways of tracking and measuring travellers’ intent, behaviour, thought patterns, sensitivities, sensibilities, desires, fantasies and needs. This means that, more than ever before, suppliers are better able to understand the behavioural patterns of their customers and competitors. In addition, these data are easier than ever to produce, capture, collect, analyse, integrate and use.
Big Data heralds
a vast opportunity for all travel and tourism entities, equipping them with the
tools to improve both the commercial and experiential sides of their businesses.
As with any radical shift, however, the opportunities arrive hand-in-hand with
the potential for significant challenges—challenges that Tourism Intelligence
International (TII) describes as the four Cs: increased Competition, the need for new flows of Creativity and Content
as well as the need to better understand and satisfy Customers.
So how can Big Data deliver the big picture to drive travel and tourism competitiveness? The real gem of Big Data is the competitive power that it gives businesses to push the envelope on understanding consumer behaviour. This in turn creates the ability, par excellence, for businesses to predict, anticipate and exceed customer expectations in order to orchestrate the experience of a lifetime – the true raison détre of the travel and tourism business.
As the amount of data continues to grow exponentially, compounded by a variety of new technologies such as the
Internet, social media, cloud computing, mobile devices and the Internet of
Things, it poses both a challenge and an opportunity for the travel and tourism
sector - how to capture, store, manage and use the ever increasing volume of data being generated. The big
question is how organisations in the present can unlock the value of Big Data to deliver a vision into the future to predict and
anticipate consumer behaviour.
By using Big Data analytics, businesses and governments alike can
analyse huge amounts of data in lightning speed to accurately reveal previously
unseen patterns, sentiments and consumer and market trends. This velocity and veracity of data insight, delivered across any device including computers,
smart phones and tablets, means that executives in the travel and tourism
industry can make better and faster decisions.
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| The Six Vs of Big Data Source: Tourism Intelligence International, 2014
META Group. “3D Data
Management: Controlling Data Volume, Velocity, and Variety.” February 2001
|
The
benefits for the consumers are also many, from revolutionizing the information
available at their fingertips, to taking back control of their own data to
understand behavioural patterns such as energy consumption or spending habits. This
in turn gives the consumer greater power in the new paradigm (Tourism Intelligence International, The
Paradigm Shift in Travel and Tourism, 2013). And in this new paradigm data is changing the
way we think, feel, behave, conduct business, work and live.
In its easy-to-read, down-to-earth and thoroughly researched report, Big Data — Delivering
the Big Picture to Drive Competitiveness, Tourism Intelligence International (TII) has created a comprehensive guide to understanding Big Data and how to use it to drive competitiveness. This report points out that Big Data can be used as a fundamental
tool for greater industry-wide innovation. Big Data demands big ideas and the
courage to implement them. Managing and
analysing data is no longer an issue for IT departments alone; instead it is
driving the travel and tourism industry’s business agenda. But while the data is big and many large
companies are at the forefront of the trend, it can be adopted by small and
medium-sized enterprises as well, and in many cases, with little effort or
expense. So Big Data is not just for the
big companies. Big Data is for all of
those companies—micro, small, medium, large and mega—and tourism destinations, that
would like to understand their customers better, anticipate their needs and
help them to deliver memorable and exceptional services. In other words, it is for those companies
that care about their customers and want to be in business for the long term.
This report, Big Data — Delivering the Big Picture to
Drive Competitiveness examines a number of companies both within
and outside of the travel and tourism industry that are using Big Data in big
ways, for example, British Airways, Kayak, Marriott, Macy’s,
UPS, adMarketing and ReviewPro. These examples deliver important insights
into the challenges and opportunities in using Big Data to drive
competitiveness.
Tourism Intelligence International (TII), is committed to better understanding the impact of major trends in the travel and tourism industry and to facilitate decision-making in those critical areas most likely to deliver change. Indeed, TII has been tracking trends in travel and tourism for well over 30 years. This “new” Big Data trend is one of many that will drive businesses to reinvent themselves, as the tour operators and travel agencies have had to do with the dawn of the Internet. Some will win, but others will go out of business, if they do not adapt to and adopt Big Data.
Tourism Intelligence International has put together twenty (20) winning strategies that could help any organisation of any size to use and benefit from Big Data analytics. For these strategies and much more, order your copy of TII's report bl clicking on the image below.
- Diagonal Integration
- The Paradigm Shift in Travel and Tourism
- Fifty Shades of Green
- Sustainability is Sexy
- Communities Count
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