Big Data - Delivering the Big Picture to Drive Competitiveness

 

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 Contentas 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.

 

 

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.