What are people saying about your destination?

People are talking about their travel experiences. The Internet contains millions and millions of conversations about the places people go, where they stay, and what they do, which has an enormous effect on travel decisions. Recommendations within networks of family, friends, acquaintances, and global online communities provide word-of-mouth promotion for tourism destinations, but this has traditionally been seen as outside the destination marketing organization (DMO)’s sphere of influence.

Today, conversations and recommendations are moving online, splintering into endless channels. Just about everyone can publish recommendations, trip planning guides, or reviews. Visitors have never had more potential points of influence. In this new paradigm, many DMOs are redefining themselves, since these organizations are no longer the single source of information and promotion (advertising). Their singular authority is eroding.

On the other hand, the Internet brings destination marketers like you new opportunities to access and analyze word of mouth. You have access to the world’s largest-ever collection of information about how people think and feel about your tourism destination. Today, you can finally answer the question: What are people saying about your destination?

Image credit: KT King, Flickr

Tourism Sentiment Index places the power back in your DMO’s hands

“What gets measured, gets managed.” – Peter Drucker

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Until now, destinations have never been easily able to measure and analyze word-of-mouth promotion. The industry has instead measured visitor sentiment in small samples, whether through exit surveys, feedback forms, online polls, or Net Promoter Score (NPS). While providing useful primary research, these methods are costly. They can’t begin to measure and analyze the thousands and millions of public conversations that impact a destination’s brand.

Now for the first time, destinations can measure online sentiment at enormous scale using a methodology designed exclusively for them. This new report is called Tourism Sentiment Index. It is accessible to destinations of any budget and relevant to DMOs of any size.

“It feels as if you have reached a ‘holy grail’ in tourism marketing and measurement of actions.” – Ashley Harvey, COO, Go Central Japan

At Destination Think, we’ve spent the past decade helping international destination marketing organizations (DMOs) with everything from strategic planning, to experience development, to branding, to promotion and content marketing. Within all of these areas, we’ve found that online sentiment is the most powerful data source we can use to help DMOs make confident decisions because word of mouth has a huge impact on travel decisions.

Each destination is unique, but our team knows the common challenges DMOs face. So we’ve designed a report containing essential data that we’d want if we were responsible for managing a destination.

Now is your chance to truly measure word of mouth and manage your destination’s performance. Get Tourism Sentiment Index. Apply now.

Why Tourism Sentiment Index is “the holy grail” for destination marketers

Tourism Sentiment Index is a straight-forward report, filled with insights that are easy to interpret and translate into action. This report can:

Analyze everything said about your destination online

• Tourism Sentiment Index collects data from over 500,000 sources and presents the results in a way that identifies opportunities for your DMO.

Measure destination performance with a simple KPI

• Easily communicate success to stakeholders and align them around your destination’s priorities.

Enable you to benchmark against competitors

• Compare your performance against destinations of your choosing.

Categorize success across 50 areas of conversation

• This allows you to understand how your tourism assets are performing, and find strengths and opportunities.

Provide crystal-clear focus to align your team and your stakeholders

• It becomes easier to lead people toward a common story in alignment with your destination brand.

In many ways, Tourism Sentiment Index (TSI) is the missing puzzle piece for destination marketers. The TSI report provides a foundation that empowers destination marketers to truly measure and manage word-of-mouth promotion at scale, for the first time.

Use Tourism Sentiment Index to measure your destination’s performance and confirm your next course of action. Apply now.

“These insights allow us to better tell our story to our stakeholders. That’s really important.” – Paul Hawes, Chief Marketing & Distribution Officer, Destination Greater Victoria

Image credit: moviecoco568, Flickr

Interview: “If you don’t evolve, you don’t compete.”

How Tourism Sentiment Index validated Tourism Kamloops’ shift to a digital-centric marketing plan

More and more DMOs are using Tourism Sentiment Index to measure word of mouth at scale (see the full list). But what does that mean for the leaders of those
organizations?

In a live interview with our CEO Rodney Payne, Monica Dickinson, Director of Industry Relations & Communications at Tourism Kamloops, shared how TSI has helped validate her DMO’s investments in digital marketing.

Rodney begins by asking Monica how Tourism Kamloops has been evolving:

See the full list of destinations using the Tourism Sentiment Index report to lead their strategies and validate marketing decisions. Is yours among them?

Tourism Sentiment Index: How it works and what it measures

“The TSI report was the piece of the puzzle we needed to validate our shift in focus to a social media and digital marketing-centric plan. – Monica Dickinson, Director of Indsutry Relations & Communications at Tourism Kamloops

Word-of-mouth promotion is and always has been the predominant influence on the travel decision-making process. What does that mean for you?

It’s now imperative that destination marketers are able to capture, analyze and influence the stories people share, at scale.

But, according to Forbes, “there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data [being] created each day.” That translates to roughly 650 million tweets, 95 million Instagram posts and 300 million Facebook photos being shared between peers every single day—and that doesn’t even begin to cover other platforms like blogs, messages boards, comments, or reviews. How many of these are about your destination? How many are promoters or detractors?

People are engaging in thousands, perhaps millions, of public conversations about your destination online. Knowing that these conversations have been shown to influence travel decisions, how can destination marketers interpret such a vast quantity of word of mouth and visitor sentiment? DMOs need new techniques for gathering relevant conversations and translating them into meaningful strategic insights. That’s where TSI comes in.

Built using AI and a methodology designed specifically for DMOs, TSI discovers and analyzes what people are actually saying about your destination online, giving you the power to measure and manage word of mouth at scale, like never before.

Analysis of the data leads to a single, easily understood KPI called Tourism Sentiment Score™.

You’re looking at the new standard for destination performance measurement. Get Tourism Sentiment Index and lead your destination with confidence.

Tourism Sentiment Score™: The ultimate destination performance metric

Tourism Sentiment Score is a measure of a destination’s ability to generate positive word of mouth about its tourism offering. It is an aggregate score that focuses solely on online conversations that reference or affect a potential traveller’s perceptions of a destination.

Here’s how the score is calculated:

1. We scan, identify and analyze more than 500,000 online, peer-to-peer communication platforms for conversations about your destination;
2. We collect all conversations related to your destination and then filter those conversations that are driven by your tourism industry. Each unique conversation is sorted into one of three sentiment categories: promoter, passive, and detractor. While neutral messages are limited to general mentions, positive and negative messages either encourage or discourage tourism around your destination, respectively;
3. The report totals the number of each message type to determine the percentage of positive, neutral, and negative online conversations. It then subtracts the percentage of negative messages from the positive and multiplies the sum by 100, giving you a single number–your Tourism Sentiment Score™.

Online conversations about your destination are sorted into one of three categories: promoter, passive, or detractor.

The percentage of detractors is subtracted from the percentage of promoters and multiplied by 100 to arrive at your destination’s Tourism Sentiment Score™.

Your Tourism Sentiment Score™ (TSS) serves as a benchmark for you to track and measure your destination’s online reputation over time. You’ll be able to overcome some of the time-consuming challenges that come with standard KPIs like Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is limited in scope and difficult to measure. Instead of measuring what people might say when prompted, TSI provides tangible insight by measuring what people are already saying in candid, authentic conversations online.

Armed with TSI’s comprehensive data, you’ll have a single evaluation that depicts your destination’s assets – its strengths and weaknesses – in an extensive, easy-to-understand report.

We’re making the richest data on word of mouth available to destinations everywhere. Get your Tourism Sentiment Index report.

See how your destination’s tourism assets compare against competitors and a global index

Tourism Sentiment Index (TSI) has a lot to offer destination marketing organizations (DMOs). The report captures and analyses thousands of online conversations about your destination. But you need to place that data in context. That’s why TSI also allows you to compare your performance with other destinations.

The TSI initiative is collecting data about destinations all over the world. That means that in addition to getting deep insights into your destination brand, you also get an opportunity to see how it performs against your competitors, as well as an aggregate set of international DMOs.

Here’s how. Overall, TSI provides a view of how your destination is perceived and discussed among travel consumers. Built upon methodology specific to the destination marketing industry, we look at thousands of words and images related more than 50 categories of tourism assets selected to cover experiences and services common to DMOs around the world. Examples include restaurants, shopping, camping, beaches, or transportation.

Our analysis reveals how people feel about these 50+ different experiences and services in your destination. Each conversation tracked by TSI is organized by category to show how each one is really performing in terms of public perception. This highlights strengths and weaknesses in your destination’s brand and its tourism offering.

First, TSI measures the volume of mentions for each category. Volume is an important metric because it indicates the level of overall awareness. A greater volume of conversation around your destination means more people are talking about it. And more people talking about it means more people learning about it, which ultimately increases the number of potential new visitors.

Volume, however, does not necessarily indicate quality. That’s why TSI also compares the sentiment behind the conversations around each asset and measures it against other destinations ranking for those same offerings. The comparative sentiment analysis will determine whether your destination’s assets rank high, average or low against your competitive set. It also compares your assets against our international database. So, in one fell swoop, you can see how your tourism assets stack up against other destinations on a global scale.

From a high-level overview to more granular sentiment data, TSI is the only way to easily compare and contrast your destination to destinations across the world. The report includes an opportunity to organize and measure tourism development around the world, empowering DMOs everywhere to identify strengths and weaknesses and make better-informed strategic decisions.

Want to use big data to gauge your destination’s performance? We’ve done all the homework; you simply need to apply. Get Tourism Sentiment Index today.

Interview: Leading & Aligning Your Stakeholders

“These insights allow us to better tell our story to our stakeholders.”

Given your destination marketing organization (DMO)’s public role, strategic planning can only make its most powerful impact when it has strong support from your destination’s stakeholders. The Tourism Sentiment Index (TSI) report is the missing piece of the puzzle. It helps destination marketers validate their decisions and gather a groundswell of participation that will bring their strategies to life.

Paul Hawes, Chief Marketing & Distribution Officer at Destination Greater Victoria, shared why his DMO joined our TSI pilot project and how the report helps him engage with stakeholders.

Paul is a destination marketing veteran, with 20 years of experience in the hospitality and tourism sectors, including senior roles with Destination Canada and Destination New South Wales, based in London. Greater Victoria is a small city located on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada. Destination Greater Victoria completed a rebranding project in 2018, with the help of Destination Think, to update public perception of this captivating place surrounded by mountains and the sea.

How is your destination trending?

How will you rank among competitors in a year from now? In two? Using data from the past three years of conversation, we can project a trend for your destination’s Tourism Sentiment Score™, which reflects the overall performance of your destination’s brand.

We then determine the scores of your five closest competitors, using three years of data about each of them. This allows us to show how that group is trending collectively. You can then see how your destination’s performance compares to your competitors’ today, and where the trends are pointing.

Tourism Sentiment Score™ is the ideal KPI to make sure your performance continues to rise above your competitors.

The Tourism Sentiment Score™ trend for your destination and its competitors are compared based on the past three years of data.

Apply for your Tourism Sentiment Index report

Ready to join the world’s leading DMOs? Discover what the world is saying about your destination. Get Tourism Sentiment Index.

What the destination marketing industry is saying:

See the full list of destinations we’ve analyzed. Is yours among them?

Infographic:
10 ways Tourism Sentiment Index gives you the data you need to lead your destination

Now is your chance to truly measure word of mouth and manage your destination’s performance. Get Tourism Sentiment Index. Apply now.