The Neverending Quest to Quantify Travel Experience
Some concepts lend themselves more easily to quantifying than others. Working out how much money is spent on travel each year is relatively easy, for example – you just add up all the receipts (if you can find them) – but other elements of the travel experience are more ephemeral.
Let’s consider the social sciences – psychology, sociology, etc. One of the greatest challenges facing these fields of study is how to take somewhat abstract and nebulous concepts such as "happiness” or "intelligence” and measure them in such a way as to generate quantitative data that can be analyzed for statistical significance and compared to past and future research?
The world of travel procurement has a similar problem. With the world of business becoming increasingly data driven, how do we measure travel experience in a quantifiable manner so as to leverage the maximum value from the information gathered?
Data Characterization
Research published in the journal, Frontiers in Big Data sought to discover through comparison which data-driven models out of venue data, textual data, and factual data, were most effective at characterizing travel data.
"The performance of data-driven systems is inherently determined by the underlying quality of data, which is becoming increasingly hard to judge in the current era of big data,” said the report. "When deciding on which features to use in the data model of an information retrieval or content-based recommender system, there are often several options to choose from. Out of the many options how to model a domain, how can one determine which instantiation of the available data is the best?”
It was found that textual models were most effective at characterizing city data, whereas those models based on factual and venue data were less useful in this context. Research such as this helps to improve the data analysis of travel destinations by providing feedback regarding data quality weighed against the travel experience.
Measuring Tourism with Big Data
Further academic investigation published in Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights leveraged passive GPS and mobile data in an effort to quantify travel experience through digital technology.
Measuring three holiday destinations in Germany, passive mobile data and passive GPS data were compared with reference data from the destinations for twelve weeks in the summer of 2019. It was discovered that, while neither option was perfect for measuring tourism volume in a location, they were useful when combined with additional data sources.
"It has become clear that an assessment of volume is particularly challenging due to a lack of reliable reference data,” the authors report. "This is true for overnight visits and even more true for day trips. However, it would be premature to simply declare the mobile network and the GPS app data as the new reference. One way out of this dilemma could be to use spot measurements to calibrate the multi-spot measurements used here.”
The research helps show how categorization and volume assessment data can work together to help travel brands measure tourism flows and more accurately gauge traveler activity in the future.
Sustainability
With COP27 just wrapping up at time of writing, sustainability is in the headlines once again. Travel brands in particular are under enormous pressure to better quantify sustainability in their operations so to better combat the effects of manmade climate change.
"Sustainability in tourism is a topic of global relevance, finding multiple mentions in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals,” reports the European Physical Journal of Data Science. The complex task of balancing tourism’s economic, environmental, and social effects requires detailed and up-to-date data. This paper investigates whether online platform data can be employed as an alternative data source in sustainable tourism statistics.”
Research in the EPJ Data Science discovered that digital platform data could be scraped to develop predictive sustainability labels for accommodations and used to help travel procurement teams make better and more informed decisions when it comes to booking trips.
"The algorithmic prediction of accommodations’ sustainability using online data can provide a cost-effective and accurate measure that allows to track developments of tourism sustainability across the globe with high spatial and temporal granularity,” continues the report.
Final Thoughts
There we have just three ways academics are working to create new ways of categorizing and measuring travel data. With these developments and others, travel procurement teams can constantly strengthen and develop their data-driven decision-making capabilities.
Increasing the use of data in the travel business is useless without the research going on in the background to improve our understanding of that information, how it’s gathered and characterized, and how it’s applied.
Quantifying the travel experience is sure to be a hot topic at FIMA 2023, being held in April at the Westin Copley Place, Boston MA.
Download the agenda today for more information and insights.