Events, such as festivals, exhibitions, and sporting challenges are effective ways for destinations to attract visitors, increase expenditure, and provide a boost to local businesses. By tracking events it makes it possible to monitor the effect they have on the local economy, such as room occupancy, footfall, visitors to attractions, etc.
Other important 'events' to record are those social, political, cultural or weather related events that may impact visitor behaviour. For example national lockdowns, national transport strikes that may prevent travel, storms that effect power supplies, etc.
Equally, a big digital media marketing campagin or new promotion targeted to international visitors are also 'events' that will be beneificial to your destination performance analysis to record.
T-Stats Solutions tracks events through a calendar (left). The calendar can be colour coded by type of event (sports, arts, etc) and events are placed in the calendar with or without the known (or estimated) number of visitors expected each day.
When analysing your data click on a data point to see a slide in screen that will tell you if any event occured within that data point time period. Below we can see that shopping centre car parking was at 0 in June and the Events tracker can remind us this was due to the Car Park Redevelopment.
Usually it is the Destination Management Organisation (or equivalent) which looks after the calendar, keeping it up-to-date. It is extremely easy to add events, with just the date and event name being essential. It takes less than a minute to add an event to the system.