Tourism Partnership of Niagara chief executive officer Darryl MacMillan said, as a result of a three-year strategic plan it began implementing last year, the region’s tourism industry is making a “significant organizational shift toward fully embracing destination management, where it was previously focused almost exclusively on marketing.”
MacMillan, Niagara Parks CEO David Adames and Niagara Economic Development research and analysis manager Blake Landry addressed Niagara Region’s planning and economic development committee last week about the Niagara Tourism Data Dashboard being implemented in September.
It will provide shared information about tourism trends in the region to help operators and investors make informed decisions.
MacMillan said recent Tourism Partnership of Niagara research has “consistently identified a high demand for reliable and consistent tourism data.”
Niagara’s roughly 4,000 tourism-related businesses need accurate, high-frequency data to make better decisions, in an industry that generates about $3.8 billion in annual visitor spending and employs more than 36,000 people, he added.
“When we talk about tourism investment, tourism attraction, data is so important,” Adames said.
He said the dashboard will establish a regionwide approach to measuring and understanding the impact of Niagara’s tourism industry.
Adames said tourism operations such as Niagara Parks can contribute data from attractions, restaurants, golf courses, parking, transportation and heritage sites that will assist tourism operators throughout the region.
He said it will also help foster additional investments.
“Having reliable, consistent and comparable data will help support an aligned approach to tourism investment, product development and strategic planning,” he said.
Adames said he is confident the dashboard will become an important tool for tourism operators, industry partners and decision-makers at multiple levels of government.
MacMillan said the provincial government’s announcement last December of a Destination Niagara strategy “presents a unique opportunity to seize on current momentum while aligning efficiencies.”
Adames agreed.
“If we’re going to collectively achieve the aspirational goals of Destination Niagara strategy, we need to make data-based decisions regarding investment attractive, appealing to visitors, and encouraging that investment that we have seen and continue to see across Niagara,” he said.
Landry said the dashboard is expected to launch in September and be updated quarterly, pulling together data from multiple sources into one location that will be publicly accessible.
Landry said the dashboard will include information on visitation, visitor spending, accommodations, employment, business counts, inflation, retail sales, border crossings and construction investment.
“What we’re trying to do is create a single unified way to discuss and to assess the tourism environment in Niagara,” he said. “It will turn individual data into collective intelligence regionally. It’ll help us strengthen the case for investment in Niagara.”