T-Stats is different things to different organisations and different people. Whilst the common aim is to have one organised system of destination-related statistics, it can be used for a wide range of strategic objectives ranging from tracking visitor activity through to monitoring funded projects and attracting inward investment. So we spoke to two of our long-standing clients to find out what makes the system so useful for them. This is what they said.
“It’s the ability to tell the story, to see what’s making the impact. We’ve built areas in T-Stats that are monitoring unemployment, exchange rates, fuel prices, energy prices and upcoming events. We can actually start to lay those on top of each other and see what’s happening. So if the attractions have been down for a month we can see actually ‘it’s rained really hard’ or ‘there were problems with the Metro as six of the lines weren’t working’. We can now layer and build a story rather than look at figures in isolation.”
Ian Thomas, Director of Leisure Tourism and Research, Newcastle Gateshead Initiative
“We try to reinforce the point with businesses by telling them ‘since we’re a marketing organisation funded by you, if you want to benefit from us investing marketing money in the right places at the right time, then you need to tell us how business is as our knowledge is only as good as the information we’re getting from you.”
David Jackson, Marketing Cheltenham (and formerly Bath Tourism Plus)
“Suppose our bed stock increased by 25%, we’d have a lot of nervous hoteliers knocking on our door as partners. Having reliable data enables us to prove our case. With T-Stats we can work with them to say, ‘Look at the events programme we’re putting on, we’re anticipating 50,000. We know that’ll fill 67% of your bedrooms.’”
Ian Thomas, Director of Leisure Tourism and Research, Newcastle Gateshead Initiative
“Our marketing campaigns are deliberately timed around troughs which the T-Stats data identifies. The beauty of T-Stats is that it pieces all that data together in one place in the form of a dashboard.”
David Jackson, Marketing Cheltenham (and formerly Bath Tourism Plus)
“With T-Stats I can fully explain how it works to businesses and how it can help them. We’ve done lots of demonstrations and to be honest we’ve only had one business say no after they have seen T-Stats out of maybe 40-50 people.”
“T-Stats allows me to go and sit in front of a business and show them charts, and say ‘look you can pull this data out showing how your business is doing, take it to your bank manager and prove you’re viable for a loan. And I’ll give you a log in right now and you can be using it in 20 minutes time.’”
Ian Thomas, Director of Leisure Tourism and Research, Newcastle Gateshead Initiative
“If you were to go to our system now there’s hotel performance data up to yesterday. So for us as a destination, or for our businesses, to be able to go in and see to that degree of immediacy is hugely important. It’s robust because you know you’re looking at the destination as a whole.”
Ian Thomas, Director of Leisure Tourism and Research, Newcastle Gateshead Initiative
“I’ve never before had this ability to build the story of what’s happing here in any form of reporting without a lot of manual effort. So to go into T-Stats and link five things together, such as the impact an event had on visits to attractions, is amazing.”
David Jackson, Marketing Cheltenham (and formerly Bath Tourism Plus)
“It’s about the transport providers, it’s about the retail offer, and T-Stats is enabling us to get data from people we’ve never asked before. The ability to bring both leisure tourism and business tourism into one area is a massive thing - now we can better judge where to deploy our marketing spend. Partners are more likely to come back and challenge us and say, ‘We can see from your data that this is happening, what are you going to do about it?’”
Ian Thomas, Director of Leisure Tourism and Research, Newcastle Gateshead Initiative
“It’s not just the DMO that uses the intelligence from T-Stats, it’s a number of stakeholders from around the city. We work particularly closely with the Business Improvement District who find it invaluable to have a monthly snapshot on how business is doing. They are less interested in occupancy and accommodation, but they are particularly interested in piecing together a wider picture.”
David Jackson, Marketing Cheltenham (and formerly Bath Tourism Plus)
“Compared to the occupancy surveys that we have previously had, T-Stats is a tiny fraction of the cost. We can also commercialise this which is a huge opportunity for us. If a planner or a hotel investor is scouring for data, we can offer them access to this system. And it’s great to be able to offer it as an added value bonus for our fee paying members.”
Ian Thomas, Director of Leisure Tourism and Research, Newcastle Gateshead Initiative
“We used to commission bespoke research which was costly and much more resource-intensive than T-Stats, and probably wouldn’t have the buy-in from the industry to the same extent. And it certainly wouldn’t give our hoteliers and attractions that ability to benchmark with their peers.”
David Jackson, Marketing Cheltenham (and formerly Bath Tourism Plus)
