Three quarters of travel professionals working with data believe that their department will receive budget increases in 2017 against 4% who expect a decrease
Travel is awash with data and companies are loosening their
purse strings to get to the insight this provides, according to EyeforTravel’s
new industry-wide State of Data and Analytics in Travel Report 2017. Amongst
respondents, who came from all verticals in the industry, 74.5% report that
they expect budget increases in 2017. Amongst the remained
For those looking forward to more cash to play with this
year, budgets are often increasing by a substantial amount. More than half of
the entire sample reports that they expect budgets to increase by 6% or more
and 30% expect it to increase by 11% or more.
However, part of this may be because travel companies data
efforts are coming from, in general, a relatively small base. Although 65% of
the panel reports that they have a dedicated data, analysis or insight team, they
are largely staffed by small teams. Two thirds of respondents report that their
team is less than 10 employees strong and 51.5% have a team of five individuals
or less.
“The travel and tourism industry has realised the importance
of strong data analysis and is manoeuvring itself into a good position,” said
Alex Hadwick, Head of Research for EyeforTravel. “We found that in terms of analytics,
data deployment and attribution, travel is relatively advanced compared to
other industries. These planned budgetary increases will help increase the
depth of talent and acquire the tools needed to get maximum value out of the
huge amount of data that already exists and will be generated in the future.”
The survey also found variation between the expectations of
data professionals for this year when it comes to where they are based. Respondents were most optimistic about budget
increases in Asia-Pacific, followed by Europe and then finally North America.
This geographic divide was reinforced in how respondents
view the coming year for the travel and tourism industry as a whole. In both
Asia-Pacific and Europe 16.3% of respondents are neutral or negative about
growth prospects for this year, compared to 23.3% of respondents from North
America.
Hadwick believes that this is reflective of wider industry
sentiment in the region: “With the WTTC warning of changing sentiment towards
the US and reports for Q1 indicating lower flight bookings to the US, there appears
to be a bigger story here that is reflected in our data.”
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