Datafy Launches NEW Advanced Spending Dashboard

Big news: Datafy’s all-new Advanced Spending Dashboard is now live - and it’s giving Datafy clients new ways to enrich their work using comprehensive insights into how and where spending most impacts their destination. Before we get into the fun part - how you can actually put this new data to work in your destination - let’s take you behind the curtain to touch on how we did it, and why it matters. 

The new spending module looks at a cross-section of credit and debit cards from Mastercard, Visa, Discover and American Express. But rather than just aggregating and spitting the data back out, Datafy’s in-house data science team - with its years of experience in cleaning, analyzing, and modeling datasets for the travel industry - applies Datafy’s proprietary algorithm to the new raw data. This means that the previously-honed logic and technology that made us experts at factors like detecting trips, identifying visitors, removing anomalies, and correcting for sample distribution irregularities, has turned this new raw data set into the most accurate and relevant spending data available to destinations - And, it has exciting implications for the high confidence that users can have when looking at tourism-related metrics like average spend per visitor, average transactions per trip, trip length of spenders, and top spending markets. 

Now that you know how it works, let’s talk about how you can actually put it to use in your destination. 

• Understand and identify your “ideal visitor”: Are you trying to reach overnight visitors? Or maybe your hotels are full, and you want to spread the economic impact around so that more local businesses are benefiting - then let’s talk about reaching those that spend in retail or dining and nightlife. 

• Identify spending trends: Compare annual spending year-over-year and understand how spending fluctuates throughout the year. Examine the seasonal visitation patterns in your destination and see how that is reflected in spending.  

• Understand your top markets: Clearly identify which markets contribute the most to your destination in terms of economic impact and discover which region’s visitation is driving the most economic impact to your community. 

• Understand which categories are driving the most impact: Is accommodation the economic heavy-hitter in your destination? How does its impact compare to that of dining and nightlife? Or specialty retail? This tool gives us a clear picture of that breakdown. 

This new data does a LOT - but it’s also worth touching on what it doesn’t do. It isn’t a 100% capture of all spend (cash, anyone?), nor is it a direct replacement for economic impact studies, sales tax, or lodging data. (We filter out all transactions that are not in a tourism-related category, because we want this figure to be reflective of only visitor spending.)

Do you have questions about how you can put the new Advanced Spending Data to work in your destination? Reach out today and let’s get started.