A key function of destinations, DMOs, tourism bodies and municipalities is to monitor tourism, and by extension, the accommodations available in their markets. A challenge for destinations is accurately tracking the scale and nature of alternative accommodation – short-term rentals; as they are much more fragmented than traditional options. Short-term rental data for DMOs serves exactly that purpose, consolidating supply, occupancy, revenue and more to clarify the landscape, allowing you to monitor your destination with data.
How to monitor your destination with data for DMOs
Understanding the true supply & capacity of your destination
In understanding the areas and type of tourism products that are bringing the visitors in, understanding the supply is key. Critically, it allows you to understand and communicate a clear picture of the provision and capacity of alternative accommodation in your market.
Supply mapping can also help to identify and prevent potential problems with oversupply, lack of infrastructure or other issues before they actively impact the destination and its residents, ensuring social sustainability.
The challenge is, that with vacation rentals offered by many different unbranded and branded hosts or property managers, and advertised in different ways, it can be extraordinarily difficult to get an accurate picture of the short-term rental supply in your city, state or country.
What’s more, vacation rental supply is extremely reactive, adapting quickly to trends in the most demanded stock in your destination, so up to date information is important.
Our dashboards draw from over 35 million listings worldwide to build a detailed view for the current situation and trends in any destination. You can even see consolidated trends in total capacity of short-term rentals in your destination.
Supply mapping and capacity monitoring are the first steps in understanding short-term rentals in your market, but supply data can get even more useful…
Discover the property types in your market
Furthermore, this supply exists in a more granular format. DMOs who wish to analyse the breakdown of types of property in their market – houses, apartments, villas etc – or even number of bedrooms and amenities can do so.
Track the professionalisation in your destination with data for DMOs
Supply can be further analysed by host type, so that destinations can understand what proportion of their offering is managed professionally. Plus, identify the largest players in your market.
The short-term rental sector is rapidly and continually transforming from an amateur to a professionalised environment, with large companies managing multiple destinations in a similar manner to a distributed hotel. Identifying the key professional players in the industry can help to identify who are the established and up and coming stakeholders in the destination: new partners to be involved in a successful strategic initiatives for the destination.
Ultimately monitoring supply is the first step in understanding your market for strategy and communications. However it isn’t the only step – and the good news is data can stretch to performance and impacts.
Monitor your destination demand
Short-term rental data extends to performance metrics too. Track trends in occupancy and demand pacing to communicate and strategize optimally. Maybe you wish to tailor and measure campaigns to increase sustainability by monitoring visitor type behaviours and trends? Or compare post-pandemic or event-based demand?
With access to professional data, you can assess variation, seasonality, visitors, length of stay, booking window and even urban compared with non-urban demand in your destination to align, design and measure strategy.
Explore intramarket distinctions with data for DMOs
Lastly, you are able to analyse trends or disparities between different areas of your territory – neighbourhoods, cities or states for example. This enables you to specify strategy, planning and demand flows effectively.
Monitor your destination with data – get started
Data provides destinations with unparalleled, efficient insights into their supply and demand. The ability to monitor your destination with data ensures that you are able to understand, report and strategize your market capacity, supply trends, demand trends and even revenues.
You can start exploring the full extent of what data can do for your destination below, or book a demo with our team:
Over the coming weeks we will explore further use cases of data for DMOs, including benchmarking against other similar markets, forecasting, tailoring marketing and communication campaigns and understanding impact and sustainability – watch this space.