Tourism Recovery – How Far Have We Come?

Tourism is very clearly in the recovery phase following COVID-19, but to really understand the level of this recovery, and at what point visitor numbers, spend, footfall (whatever is important in your destination) surpass where they were before the pandemic, regular tracking is required.

Acorn has recently launched T-Stats Solutions, the latest and most powerful version of our tracking system that was first developed for Bath Tourism Plus back in 2010.  Surveys that are undertaken for Visit England at the national level are great for tracking general trends, but at best they provide data that is very chunky at regional levels.  These are good for general benchmarking but for destinations such as Newcastle, Greenwich or Doncaster, they need to know how tourism is performing in their cities.

T-Stats brings together anything that a destination wants to measure and track on a regular basis (usually monthly, but can be daily, quarterly or annually), so that changes from one month (or period) to another can be monitored.  By combining lots of trackers such as accommodation occupancy, footfall, visits to attractions, transport, car parking, events, weather, pretty much anything as long as it can be measured, it is possible to identify linkages in the visitor economy.

Destinations using T-Stats Solutions have access to more insight and intelligence than would be possible without it, such as how local events impact accommodation occupancy, the direct impact of social media campaigns, and how weather impacts visitor behaviour.  They also use T-Stats to quickly generate evidence for marketing decisions and produce meaningful data to attract tourism investors.

New features in T-Stats Solutions include the ability to access Airbnb data for your destination, and to automatically incorporate all of your key website and social media performance indicators.  It also includes all of the national and regional Visit England and ONS data such as accommodation occupancy, domestic tourism, day visits, international passenger survey, as well as airport arrivals, exchange rates and much more.

Bringing this all together into a single online database designed individually for each destination so that it can be shared with businesses, investors, and anyone else interested makes it a win-win solution for everyone!