For years, DMOs and tourism bodies have been basing their strategies on well established hotels and hostels in their markets. They are a known quantity, yet now there’s another player in the game. Vacation rentals now represent a very significant sector of accommodation in every market worldwide: don’t believe us? read 6 common misconceptions. They are an important consideration, yet they remain fragmented. So, how to get visibility over the short-term rentals in your area? How do you understand their impact, demand, revenue and growth? Data is how. In this article we dive into DMOs & data: how tourism organizations should approach short-term rental analysis to answer their questions and strategise effectively for their whole market.
DMOs & data: how tourism organizations should approach short-term rental analysis
To simplify the approach, we will break things down into 3 main data pillars for tourism bodies to consider:
1. Supply overview & evolution:
While the top 5 hotel brands account for over 30,000 hotels between them, the 7 million properties on Airbnb, for example, are managed by over 4.5 million hosts. With that many owners in the short-term rental sector, a centralised source of information is quite a challenge.
This fragmentation can make it hard to comprehend the size and shape of the short-term rental supply and its impact.
Luckily, sources such as our destinations dashboard house supply maps of your area illustrating deduplicated inventory. This means that you can see every STR property and which platforms it is listed on, rather than seeing every listing on an OTA. What’s more, you can see the number and distribution of different property types aswell as their revenue, ratings and owner.
The power of this kind of insight is endless: through supply data, DMOs and tourism bodies are able to run analysis on revenues and economic impact, numbers for long-term rental protection, permitting and regulations, tax remittance and more.
2. Demand; historical & future:
Now we take things one step further. Aggregating the calendars of this supply allows us to paint a picture of pricing and occupancy for your market, segment or area.
You can see what demand is like on certain days; what people are booking and how much they’re booking it for. This brings with it the ability to track the impact of public events and holidays, seasonality, or even a marketing campaign.
Furthermore, this occupancy and rate tracking isn’t just historical. Looking forward at the next year you are able to track demand for upcoming events and holidays and monitor how demand is unfolding for your destination, and how you might wish to react.
Given the current context of the pandemic and recovery, tracking the actual activity in your market has never been more useful. Both impact and recovery can be measure, and this extends to other queries such as the effects of restrictions and regulations.
3. Traveler origin and demand type:
Lastly, have you ever thought about how useful a real breakdown of guest demographics would be? From here you are able to clarify and act upon several insights:
- Origin of travelers
- Preferred type of accommodation by nationality
- Seasonality by country
- Seasonality by property type
- Group size
Can you guess which country the above market traveler data comes from? It’s Portugal, check out the rise in domestic guests during the height of the pandemic! By understanding the behaviour and trends of certain demographics, marketing efforts can be tailored in a more affective manner. And not only can you optimize campaigns, but you can also better analyze their impact by tracking the estimated number of travelers visiting the destination.
DMOs & data = short-term rental analysis
So there we have it, our 3 pillars for data analysis, and the fundamentals to your success. However you source it, procuring supply, demand and traveler data for your market to supplement your own data has never been more useful.
If you wish to learn more about Transparent’s vacation rental data provision for DMOs and tourism bodies, click right here: