Qrious unveils LoQal Destinations

1 August 2017

Qrious unveils LoQal Destinations, a pioneering big data insights-as-a-service software product for the NZ tourism industry

Big data and analytics software business, Qrious, has today unveiled ‘LoQal Destinations’, which aims to transform the New Zealand tourism industry by giving businesses and local councils access to more robust and timely location-based visitor insights.

Believed to be unique in New Zealand, the software enables users to access rich visitor insights via a subscription service. Subscribers are able to use LoQal Destinations to optimise marketing spend, enhance operational efficiencies and anticipate visitor movements.

Qrious CEO David Leach says the tourism industry has long acknowledged that there are gaps in the current data and information that is so essential to gaining a better understanding of visitor flows and travel patterns.

“Tourism is New Zealand's biggest export industry, contributing 20.7%* of New Zealand's foreign exchange earnings, yet to date there has been a lack of timely data and insights that support operators in effectively managing both day-to-day tourism operations and future growth. In its recent four year plan, Tourism New Zealand laid out very clear strategic goals – one of which is to sustain and improve the experience of visitors and host communities – and our LoQal Destinations software marks a significant step forward in supporting this goal and building the industry’s insights capability.

“Through LoQal Destinations, those within the tourism industry and local governments will now have the ability to access robust, timely, location-based insights to support their business planning, understand the impact of events in their region, optimise marketing, and track and measure visitor uplift,” says Mr Leach.

The easy to use, interactive LoQal Destinations dashboard displays a regional heat map along with detailed information regarding domestic and international visitors over time and their place of origin. A time period selector feature allows users to navigate through yearly, monthly, weekly or daily views.

Data is published to the software platform every Tuesday, providing end users with timely access to information from the previous weekend. Another benefit of this data-driven approach is that it provides a more complete picture than that of survey-based data, which has typically been gathered through traditional accommodation providers, and as such has excluded visitors using alternative accommodation, such as Airbnb and Bookabach, or those visiting friends and relatives.

Qrious made its first foray into the tourism market with the launch of its Voyager platform in May 2016, attracting a collection of the country’s top Regional Tourism Operators that represent around 75% of the total New Zealand Tourism market by value. The new LoQal Destinations software builds on these foundations to deliver an easy to use application that now provides weekly updates with daily visitor visibility.

Destination Kaikoura will be among the first in line to use LoQal Destinations, having had it donated by Qrious to support the region’s recovery efforts following last year’s devastating earthquake.

“The insights that organisations are able to generate from the existing Voyager platform have proven to be invaluable. Among other things, the platform captures the non-commercial accommodation performance of regions – information that is not readily available elsewhere,” says Destination Kaikoura’s General Manager, Glenn Ormsby.

“LoQal Destinations will build on this, helping the District to measure visitation patterns for events within one week. Having data updated every Tuesday is another great addition which will allow us to more quickly assess the effectiveness of marketing and advertising activities. This is important as we undertake a range of advertising and promotional activities we’ve never done before – including digital, radio, print and TV advertising – therefore reporting back on visitation will be helpful for the community and government agencies.

“Following November’s devastating earthquake, our focus as a region is now very firmly on rebuilding the local tourist economy. In order to achieve that, we need access to the very best and most up-to-date data intelligence and we’re excited that there is now a product on the market in LoQal Destinations that looks set to deliver that,” he says.

LoQal Destinations is accessible through a secure, intuitive web application that is desktop and tablet enabled. It is available to subscribers from today. Go to http://www.qrious.co.nz/loqal-destinations to learn more and register your interest.

ENDS

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