Greater Palm Springs attracts over 14 million visitors annually, with 6.4 million of those visitors staying overnight. One in four jobs in the area is in the hospitality industry, and the overall economic impact of tourism for the region is $7.5 billion. With the pandemic, the region saw direct spending reduced by $3.4 billion, a 54% drop. To navigate this tremendous shift, the team needed insights and data on where visitors were coming from and what they were doing while visiting to adapt their strategy. By identifying the most common countries of origin for international travelers, Greater Palm Springs knew where to better allocate its resources to draw more tourists and help compensate for events canceled due to the pandemic. This helped lead to full occupancy by summer 2021. As travel continues to rebound to pre-pandemic levels, The Near data is also helping to track visitor/traveler consumer behavior to understand where visitors are dining, shopping, and the attractions they are visiting.
Read the Case Study Here: How Greater Palm Springs used Near’s data to understand visitor origins and visitation patterns
“Our partnership with Near has provided our organization with quality data to validate strategy and resource allocation along with gaining new insights into visitor profiles, originating source markets, and their movements within the destination. Since the data is consistently updated and customizable, we are finding new ways to incorporate the data in real-time along with educating our local hospitality businesses to better support their internal programming. Everyone at Near has always been responsive and easy to work with while also accommodating all our requests,” said Gary Orfield, Director of Tourism Development, at Greater Palm Springs.
The data from Near helped the team collaborate with the airline network planners on routes, which was especially useful in responding to the changes during the pandemic. The data helped inform and validate recommendations for building new airline routes or extending routes for certain seasons. Thanks in part to these recommendations, Palm Springs International Airport has set ten monthly records since June 2022.
Greater Palm Springs was also able to gather intelligence from regional airports like LAX, San Diego, Orange County, and Ontario to understand where visitors were coming from in terms of the U.S. point of entry, and where they were going once they left the airport. This resulted in a better understanding of international markets and led to increased growth during the summer months. With this and the strategic allocation of resources, Greater Palm Springs was able to attract greater-than-usual numbers of leisure travelers, which made up for a reduction in convention business, which historically had made up 40% of visitors and business. Greater Palm Springs has seen leisure occupancy growth during the summer outpace peak season with a 17.2% increase in the past decade (versus 13.3% for January – May). The Average Daily Rate (ADR) for leisure guests in the summer months has also grown by 34.7% in this same period.
“Near is empowering Greater Palm Springs with the data and insights it needs to make strategic business decisions that will help increase its ROI and the overall tourist experience,” said Anil Mathews, Founder, and CEO at Near. “Near is the gold standard in the tourism industry and we are delighted to empower destination marketing organizations (DMOs) of all sizes as well as cities and states around the world with our people and places data to make them more competitive”
Through their partnership with Near, Greater Palm Springs has been able to use data to validate strategy and decisions in many ways. While the overall ROI contributed directly through their work with Near is challenging to measure, the data helped the team: make a case for developing new routes and expanding existing services for flights to Palm Springs International Airport, which reached record numbers of monthly passengers starting in June 2021.
About Greater Palm Springs
Visit Greater Palm Springs is the official tourism marketing agency for the Coachella Valley. Founded in May 1989 by a Joint Powers Authority comprising the cities of Palm Springs, Desert Hot Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta, and Indio, Visit Greater Palm Springs was created as a public-private partnership to help grow the region’s tourism economy. The mission of Visit Greater Palm Springs is to positively affect the destination’s tourism economy and quality of life for its citizens, serving more than 5000 GPSTBID partners and providing sales, marketing, and public relations support targeting potential leisure travelers from around the world as well as event, meeting and convention groups. Learn more here: https://www.visitgreaterpalmsprings.com/
About Near
Near, a global SaaS leader in privacy-led data intelligence curates one of the world’s largest sources of intelligence on people, places, and products. Near processes data from over 1.6 billion unique user IDs, in over 70 million places across 44 countries to empower marketing and operational data leaders to confidently reach, understand, and market to consumers and optimize their business results. With offices in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Paris, Bangalore, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo, Near serves major enterprises in retail, real estate, restaurants, tourism, technology, marketing, and other industries. For more information, please visit https://near.com
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SOURCE Near North America, Inc.
