How the Singapore Tourism Board uses data to personalise tourism
By GovInsider
The tourism board has developed a data analytics network to analyse tourist movements and boost the hospitality and retail industries.
To create better tourist experiences, the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) has developed an analytics network to collect and analyse tourist data. The Singapore Tourism Analytics Network, or STAN for short, analyses data on tourist behaviour, such as spending patterns and lengths of stay in hotels. With the network, tourism officials at all levels can now easily draw insights from data and make better decisions on tourism management.
This platform won the award for Best Data at the GovInsider Innovation Awards during the recent Innovation Labs World global summit.
Boosting hospitality and retail with data
For instance, STB wanted to help retailers maximise their profits and better target their marketing to visitors. STAN collated tourist expenditure data from local telecommunications companies, and then analysed and visualised these data for officials in an interactive, user-friendly manner.
From the STAN network, officials could then draw insights that Chinese and Indonesian tourists generally spend the most when visiting key shopping districts in Singapore. Following this, STB could then inform local retailers to create marketing plans that cater to these two markets.
What’s more, by delving deeper into the data, STB found out that Chinese visitors generally spend more for lengths of stay between 1-2 and 3-5 days when visiting Orchard Road, Marina Bay and Sentosa HarbourFront precincts, compared to visitors from Indonesia. With this insight, retailers could sharpen their marketing plans to push for greater expenditure from these two markets.
Another form of data that STAN collects is the hotels that tourists have visited. The analysis showed that approximately one in 10 tourists would change hotels during their trip in Singapore, and were most likely to switch hotels on the third day if they were in Singapore for five days or less. The data also showed that a large majority of Japanese and South Korean tourists who switched hotels had switched to a higher tier hotel, or one of the integrated resorts. Hoteliers can use these insights to create promotion bundles that will attract guests to have a longer stay.