Walk in their shoes: How your tourism organization can use its data to improve visitor experiences and drive return travel

Picture yourself as the chief insights officer of one of New Zealand’s largest public tourism organizations, tasked with growing visitor numbers and spend in your region (much like a commercial business is tasked with growing customer numbers and increasing share of wallet). With a bit of creative license, here’s one way how you might go about solving that issue. And who knows? Perhaps it could inspire something similar in your [actual] role.

Background

In a region renowned for its natural beauty, rich culture, and over 85 unique tourism experiences, a prominent tourism group is on the front lines of understanding what draws visitors in, and what keeps them coming back. With travelers arriving from more than 150 countries, the stakes are high: every insight matters when it comes to shaping strategy, guiding investment, and telling a compelling story to the world.

Behind the scenes, a lean but dedicated internal research team leads the charge. They manage an ambitious program of monthly visitor profiling, annual tracking, and custom studies, gathering feedback through in-person airport interviews and digital surveys. Their challenge isn’t collecting the data. It’s making sense of it quickly and clearly for a wide range of internal and external stakeholders who rely on their insights to drive decision-making across the tourism ecosystem.

Challenge

Despite your team’s deep expertise, your organization faced growing pressure to deliver timely, high-quality insights with limited capacity. With data scattered across tools like Excel, SPSS, and a range of legacy platforms, the process of turning raw data into useful insight was time-consuming and inconsistent. Among the key challenges:

• No centralized access to data across tourism programs.
• Manual, time-intensive open-end coding and reporting.
• No way to automate standardized deliverables.
• Inconsistent formats and reporting cycles across studies.
• Limited capacity for deep analysis or timely responses to ad hoc questions.
• Difficulty combining data sources to see the full picture.

Your team needed a better way to streamline analysis and reporting, without adding headcount or relying on outside suppliers.

Solution

After reviewing several options, and with varying schools of thought, you chose Harmoni as your end-to-end solution for data analysis and reporting. With Harmoni, your team could centralize their tourism research in one environment, visualize key metrics, and quickly respond to evolving stakeholder needs.

The platform has now enabled your team to:

• Combine monthly, annual, and ad hoc study data into a single, interactive workspace.
• Automate routine reporting with dynamic visuals and easy-to-read summaries.
• Reduce reliance on PowerPoint and spreadsheets by sharing online dashboards.
• Use built-in significance testing and intuitive filters to surface meaningful patterns.
• Empower non-technical users to explore data confidently, without analyst support.
• Import and integrate new data sources as needed, without disrupting existing workflows.

Results

Since implementing Harmoni, your tourism insights team has significantly improved the speed, quality, and accessibility of their reporting. Quarterly reports that once took days to assemble are now completed in hours, and ad hoc requests can be answered on the spot. This last point even took one of your stakeholders (who was initially hesitant on the selection of Harmoni) by surprise when you were able to answer a followup question right there in the meeting! There was no “I’ll get back to you”. 

Your insights are no longer locked in spreadsheets or reports, they’re shared across the organization in clear, compelling, and interactive formats that support strategic planning and day-to-day decisions.

And because you are growing in your ability to deliver commercial outcomes for your organization, you even have a favourite example from your use of Harmoni, and this has come from bringing two data sources together. By combining visitor feedback with activity participation data, your team identified that younger travelers were consistently rating hiking and biking trails lower than other groups, citing unclear signage and lack of transportation links. These insights prompted a regional campaign to improve trail accessibility and update signage in partnership with local councils. Within six months, satisfaction scores for these experiences rose by 28%, and the region saw a measurable increase in return visits from the under-35 age group.

The great thing about analysis tools with long-term data is that you can identify trends, implement changes in your business, and then monitor the results. In the example above, increasing return visits from that demographic will bring increased economic activity into that region, not just from those visitors, but from others who they inspire to visit (word of mouth in action).

Key outcomes after enabling your team with Harmoni:

• Faster turnaround: Time spent on data prep and manual coding has been slashed
• Improved clarity: Visualizations and built-in stats make insights easier to understand
• More impact: Reports are tailored for diverse audiences, not just researchers
• Actionable insights: Data-driven decisions led to concrete visitor experience improvements
• Stronger alignment: Teams across the organization now use a shared data language

For tourism organizations like yours who are balancing tight budgets, high expectations, and the need for real-time insights, Harmoni has become an essential part of doing more with less, while staying true to the mission of showcasing their destination to the world. 

If any part of this story has resonated with you and where you are in your insights journey, we’d love to sit down and discuss.