The Big Data in Travel panel that Tnooz ran at the New York Travel Festival was a huge hit because it was one where the audience laughed at what was being discussed.
Big Data is not all tech and math.
NB: This is a viewpoint by Larry Smith, a partner at US-based Thematix.
Sure, there are sexy articles are about uncovering million dollar insights and creating billion dollar disruptive startups, but the joy is that we can add really good "little data" that makes a difference in every stage of the dreaming to buying to sharing Travel value chain.
At the event we offered the idea that every person, company, DMO, aggregator, hotel, tour operator, and taxi cab could benefit and prosper from being a "producer of Big Data", not just a data scientist or analyst that consumes this data.
Big Data needs data and you can easily create it. You can be the data.
Thinking differently
Using pictures as an example, we all love to take them, save and share them.
We look at them when dreaming about a destination. We envy them when our friends post them. We click on ads that remind us we can go there on an affordable package deal.
Once at our destination we produce gigabytes of data as we upload to Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. And we share even more when we get home and have time to curate an album on Flickr or Picasa.
Others follow in our footsteps and soon we have a million pictures of the Freedom Tower in NYC, the Coliseum in Rome, or the Great Wall around China.
We believe these billions of photographs represent travel opportunities and free marketing for every participant in the industry.
And anyone that produces, curates, and adds value to these source images will benefit economically.
So, for example, a tour operator shepherding tourists on a bus in London asks everyone to share photographs to an account at Flickr or Pinterest, or hashtag it with their name.
In a short time thousands of photographs exist and via EXIF (EXchangeable Image File) metadata (common to most current cameras) document the route by time and day plus GPS location and the actual picture.
The result is the tour operator becomes an “authoritative source” and is rewarded by Google in searches of the places and pictures featured.
The picture time, date and location are metadata that can be combined with maps and route information and again be rewarded as an authoritative source of data.
Then combine this with weather data or market prices, and new and special insights may be found.
Besides pictures, there are many other ways the travel industry can produce Big Data and gain value from it.
Among the passive but popular techniques is to encourage social media interactions with Facebook likes, Twitter hashtags, and Foursquare check-ins.
Little-to-big
The Disney MyMagic+ "vacation management system" can track guests as they move throughout Walt Disney World and analyze their buying habits.
These Magic Bands produce tons of data about individuals, but collectively they will inform Disney about traffic patterns, ride capacity, cycle times, and many other useful customer interaction insights.
Destinations and Resorts have an opportunity to use Geocaching for treasure hunts and check-ins at both popular places or to drive traffic to a particular location.
Using a smartphone with a GPS app, or an inexpensive GPR device, people go to a precise location and document their discovery of a tag.
This small data will grow over time and deliver insights every step of the way.
Let your creativity loose around the idea that you can produce data, and get your prospects and customers to help you make more.
NB: This is a viewpoint by Larry Smith, a partner at US-based Thematix.
NB2:Give-receive tech image via Shutterstock.