Basic Input Data for Audiences’ Geotargeting by Destinations’ Partial Accessibility: Notes from Slovakia

Abstract

The presented notes focus partially on two of the basic elements (accessibility and image) of any managed tourism destination from the perspective of basic ETL processes over open and third-party data. The specific case aims to investigate the usability of open government data on occupancy in combination with third-party data on online audiences’ engagement for DMOs’ potential seasonal geotargeting via utilizing Openrouteservice’s APIs. For the pilot case, a Slovak (Central Europe) destination’s data on occupancy, and the DMO’s website and social media engagement by origin were used to determine potential audiences’ accessibility by car. Testing of the pilot results on a sample of foreign markets indicates that by a partial mix of the means of transportation, the vast majority of audiences are within a 4 h long incoming trip. Although the preliminary tests indicate a linear correlation between the destination’s occupancy and online audiences’ share accessibility by car, for further extrapolation, the list of missing input remains long. The main addition to the field of tourism and destination management may be the partial reusability of developed techniques for data extraction, and transformation for further data overlays, which may save some time.

Keywords

• tourism
• destination management
• open data
• Openrouteservice
• distance matrix
• online audiences