When we started thinking about this concept, what came to the forefront was you. Our partners. What can we do that is worth their time? And so this is where we landed. Big shout out to Katie and Kristin for all their work to pull this off, too. This is just the beginning of the program and we have a lot of great topics and speakers to come, but hopefully by the end of the day you’ll walk away energized, motivated and ready to take over the world. New age of research. What’s that mean? Sure, it’s about new data sources and being cutting edge with aggregating, displaying and harnessing that information. But it’s also about modernizing our internal processes at Visit St. Pete/Clearwater. And how we liaise with you. Everyone in this room relies upon us to lead the way on destination research and I’ve made it a priority to make sure that’s being felt by all of you like never before. As many of you know we’ve been going through a bit of an evolution on the research side over the past 24 months. And so I wanted to take 10 minutes today to talk about what that evolution has looked like, where we’re at in the process and how it’s benefitting you, our partners.

This was us not long ago. Relying on intercept surveys as one of our few sources of information and not necessarily diversifying that research stack. We still utilize intercept surveys as they’re very valuable, but it’s one of many pieces to our research puzzle now. Thankful to have Destination Analysts here today, our new intercept research firm, Dave Bratton will be giving a lightning round presentation later in the program.

OLD REPORTS Not only did we have limited scale sources, but many of the other data sources were stuck in static formats, like PDFs. You can’t manipulate this data. Once it’s in the PDF, you have to build a separate Excel file and presentation and graphic and then when another month comes in you have to edit everything and OH if you need just a 6-month running data set, forget about it. Impossible to efficiently use this data and information.

DATA SOURCES STR Airports Destination Analysts Google Paid media Facebook Air Sage Bed tax On top of outdated processes and static reports, we have a lot of data sources, which creates silos for that information. All of this living independently of each other, making it impossible to see patterns, trends or correlations.

Not only did we have limited scale sources, but many of the other data sources were stuck in static formats, like PDFs. You can’t manipulate this data. Once it’s in the PDF, you have to build a separate Excel file and presentation and graphic and then when another month comes in you have to edit everything and OH if you need just a 6-month running data set, forget about it. Impossible to efficiently use this data and information.

Cloud based BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TOOL STR Google Airports Facebook Paid media Destination Analysts AirSage Bed tax Economic modeling So, I went to Miles Parntership, our long-time digital agency, and said what if we had a place that I, the staff, our board and even our partners could go and access all of our data and research. That’s not a simple ask. BUT if you know Gray Lawry at Miles, he’s here somewhere, you know he LOVES data and complicated tasks. So, we embarked on creating a business intelligence tool. A cloud-based system that we could log into from anywhere and access data from any one of our many sources. And it would all be visualized in a way that made sense to someone who wasn’t as smart as Gray. I’m excited to tell you we’ve got this beast up and running and will show you the real thing momentarily.

But you know we’ve never got enough data But you know we’ve never got enough data. Now that we’re pulling in more data and research sets than ever, I’m gonna need more data. Because we need to understand our customer, our return on investment and on future more than ever.

International research WHAT’S NEXT? BI Tool Private data co-ops International research New in-house position Here are some of the places I’m looking to take us very soon. Would be AMAZING to work with our hoteliers in the room for private data co-ops. Adara, who’s represented here today by Andria who is talking later, is all about this. Entering an agreement between two parties that can mutually benefit by sharing data. We have some great tools that can help benefit the hoteliers and the hoteliers have some great customer data. We’re just embraking on an international research study with Miles Parntership to get a better understanding of what our international visitor looks like and what markets might be opportunities at growing our visitor base the right way, with high spending and long stays. And I’m really excited about this one. We’re bringing on our first-ever in-house research position. The position actually just closed and I’m encouraged because we got 55 acpplications, which was more than the social media position we just advertised. Wow! This person will now lead the BI Tool charge and make sure we’re at the forefront of destination research.

Not only did we have limited scale sources, but many of the other data sources were stuck in static formats, like PDFs. You can’t manipulate this data. Once it’s in the PDF, you have to build a separate Excel file and presentation and graphic and then when another month comes in you have to edit everything and OH if you need just a 6-month running data set, forget about it. Impossible to efficiently use this data and information.