Reference case
European Travel Commission
Tracking multi-destination travelers with AI
Europe is widely regarded as the world’s top tourist destination. On a trip to Europe, visitors from other parts of the world often visit more than one location, partly due to the ‘ease of travelling’ between European countries and destinations. The European Travel Commission (ETC), responsible for the promotion of Europe as a tourist destination in third markets, chose Kairos Future to perform a study aiming for a nuanced understanding of multidestination travel patterns of travelers from key long-haul markets. We conducted a data mining study based on 4 million online travel reviews to get a detailed image of the itineraries used by multi-destination travelers from China, India, Japan, and the U.S.
The key insights show potential synergies, which can be leveraged by European destinations to tailor marketing and to identify potential partners for cooperation. The analysis also included finer mapping of travel clusters of destinations on a town/city level. Through this, national tourism organizations were advised not only with whom they should cooperate, but also how they should do it. This approach created a strong opportunity for local tourism authorities and product providers to engage in cross-border cooperation.
The report has been very well received among the National Tourism Organisations in Europe that are members of ETC, Jennifer Iduh, Head of Research at ETC says. It is fascinating how all this information is available out there, but only useful when analyzed and visualized in a professional way.
The map below reveals the most popular European itineraries advertised by online travel agencies (OTAs) in the Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and the American travel markets.