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. Below are some examples of how T-Stats helps and has helped our clients.
“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
“T-Stats is perfect for us in being able to have all our information in one place and be able to interrogate datasets side by side, as well as see at-a-glance how the year is progressing. The team are very responsive to any of our requests or enquiries and T-Stats has been a vital tool for us during the recent challenging times post-pandemic.”
Helen Tate, Research Manager, Cumbria Tourism
“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
"We find T-Stats so useful to have all data in one place so to make monitoring of our destination performance simpler.”
Su Whiting, Head of Marketing and Development, Visit Greenwich
“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
“NGI is certain of the success of T-Stats due to its instrumental value when updating partners at destination partner events with occupancy and footfall data. In addition, with our newsletter that gets sent out weekly, weekly occupancy is always included. Additionally, the tool is regularly referred to internally when NGI staff are trying to understand context around certain events or post-Covid performance to share with other partners, stakeholders, or simply to inform the organisation.”
Elizabeth Laurent, Research Executive, 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
“Working in partnership with local authorities and strategic partners has been key. The last few years have not been without their challenges, but having our finger on the pulse has been incredibly useful, and enabled us to lobby for support in an effective and timely way.”
Helen Tate, Research Manager, Cumbria Tourism
“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)
