How DMOs Use Real-Time Tourism Data to Measure & Grow Visitation

Key Takeaways:

• Real-time tourism data can help you measure actual visitor activity by capturing both hotel and short-term rental performance rather than relying on delayed or incomplete reports.
• Forward-looking insights, such as booking pace and lead time, can help you adjust marketing, staffing, and budget decisions proactively rather than reacting at the end of the season.
• Geographic source data shows which feeder markets deliver the strongest demand and highest spend, enabling more targeted and cost-effective campaign strategies.
• Comprehensive data support transparent communication with stakeholders, improve budget justification, and strengthen policy decisions with verified occupancy, supply, and demand trends.

Imagine standing before your city council with a tourism performance report that tells only half the story. Your hotel data may look strong, but what about the thousands of Airbnb and Vrbo guest nights getting booked across neighborhoods? How much visitor spending never makes it into your economic impact reports? And how can you tell that the last season’s marketing campaigns actually drove visitation?

These questions barely scratch the surface of the challenges you face as a DMO. You’re responsible for measuring and growing tourism, yet the data you rely on is often incomplete, delayed, or blind to the rapidly expanding short-term rental sector. 

When only hotel metrics are your primary source of information, it becomes almost impossible to demonstrate the destination's full performance.

Accurate and timely insights are essential for everything you manage as a DMO—from budget justification and annual planning to evaluating campaign performance and addressing homeowner concerns. However, when tax data arrives months late, and lodging metrics capture only a fraction of actual visitor activity, it becomes challenging to plan and execute a strategy.

Real-time tourism data sources insights directly from hotels and STRs, allowing you to see visitor demand, booking behavior, and market performance as it unfolds. 

According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, real output for the travel and tourism sector grew by 7% in 2023, outpacing the overall U.S. economy at 2.9%, highlighting how quickly the landscape is shifting and how crucial real-time visibility is.

In this article, we’ll review how you can use real-time tourism data to measure the visitor volume, prove impact, and drive sustainable growth across all your destinations.

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Why Traditional Tourism Data Tells an Incomplete Story

As a DMO, you’re expected to measure the full impact of tourism, justify budgets, and guide strategic decisions—but most DMOs rely on data sources that only capture part of what’s happening in the destination. 

Without a complete view of visitor activity across both hotels and short-term rentals,  it becomes difficult to understand actual demand, monitor performance, or respond quickly to market shifts.

Traditional tourism data sources can fall short in several ways:

• Hotel-Only Data:
  
  • Tools such as STR (Smith Travel Research) provide reliable hotel performance metrics, but they exclude the rapidly growing STR sector.
  • In many U.S. destinations—especially beach, mountain, and resort markets—STRs now represent a significant portion of total lodging supply, meaning that hotel-only reports only paint a partial and outdated picture.
• Tax Revenue Lag:
  
  • Occupancy tax collections are often reported months after stays occur, which delays essential insights.
  • This lag can make it challenging for you to adjust strategy, evaluate campaign effectiveness, or communicate timely results to stakeholders.
• Airport and Traffic Counts:
  
  • These sources can indicate volume trends, but cannot show:
    
    • Where visitors stayed
    • How long they stayed, what they paid
    • Whether demand came from hotels or short-term rentals.
  • Without lodging details, you cannot connect mobility trends to economic impact or destination performance.
• Survey-Based Methods:
  
  • Visitor surveys are expensive to conduct and often rely on small sample sizes.
  • Self-reported data introduces inaccuracies around spending, trip purpose, and accommodation choice.
  • Surveys also lack real-time value—they can help explain past behavior, but cannot guide immediate strategy.

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The Complete Picture: What DMOs Need to Track

To measure accurate destination performance, you need more than just hotel reports and (lagging) tax data. 

A complete view of visitation requires real-time insights across STRs, booking behavior, geographic origins, and competitive context. These datasets can help you understand what drives demand and how to influence it.

STR Performance Data

• Occupancy rates across the destination.
• Average daily rates (ADR) and revenue per available rental (RevPAR).
• Supply growth and inventory changes.
• Property type and bedroom count distribution to understand traveller preferences.

Short-term rentals represent a large share of lodging supply in many tourism markets. For instance, in Gulf Shores & Orange Beach, combining hotel and STR performance data helped them drive a 25% increase in guest check-ins and an 11% increase in daily rates, results that would have been invisible with hotel data alone.

Forward-Looking Booking Pace

• Reservations already on the books for the upcoming months.
• Pace vs. the prior year to understand acceleration or softening.
• Lead time trends, showing how far in advance visitors book.

Booking pace gives you visibility into demand before travelers arrive, allowing you to adjust campaigns, staffing, or messaging early rather than waiting for end-of-season reports.

Geographic Source Data

• Where visitors originate (domestic states, regional markets, international arrivals).
• Changes in feeder markets over time, including emerging high-value geographies.
• Spend and length-of-stay patterns by origin market

Knowing which markets deliver the highest spend and longest stays helps you decide where to focus your resources. In 2024, Houston welcomed over a million overseas visitors, with the top five origin countries alone generating more than $500 million in local spend and average per-trip spending above $1,000—the kind of origin-market insight you can use to prioritize high-value feeder markets.

Seasonal and Event-Level Insights

• Performance during festivals, conferences, and major events.
• Shoulder-season booking patterns to identify latent demand.
• Day-of-week demand, revealing fluctuations in weekend vs. weekday stays.

Seasonal and event-level visibility can help you justify event funding, support partners, and extend visitor seasons. Forward-looking analytics can also allow your teams to anticipate compression or soft periods well before tax data arrives.

Competitive Set Context

• How your destination performs against similar markets.
• Regional trends and national trends that influence performance.
• Understanding whether shifts are localized or part of a broader pattern

Benchmarking shows whether changes in occupancy, ADR, or pacing are due to destination-specific factors or wider market forces. This is essential for communicating with homeowners and validating strategic decisions.

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How DMOs Use Real-Time Data Across Key Functions 

Real-time tourism data can transform how you plan, execute, report, and govern your destinations. Here’s how you can utilize them:

1. Campaign Measurement and Optimization

• Track booking pace from target markets during or after a campaign—as soon as bookings roll in, you’ll know whether the marketing push is working.
• Adjust spend mid-campaign based on performance—if a feeder market under-delivers, you can reallocate budget to stronger ones.
• For instance, let’s say your team runs a digital campaign in two neighboring states. Within days, real-time data shows bookings increasing in one market but remaining flat in the other. It gives your team the time to understand and redirect the budget toward the stronger-performing state while the campaign is still active.

2. Strategic Planning and Forecasting

• Real-time data can help you understand total visitor volume, including short-term rentals, which represent a rapidly expanding part of the U.S. lodging supply.
• The U.S. households in Q2 of 2025 spent over $1.08 trillion on food services and accommodations, underscoring the scale of demand and the importance of accurate forecasting.
• With pace data and forward-looking occupancy, you can model future scenarios and identify growth opportunities in seasons or segments that historically underperformed.

3. Stakeholder Communication and Budget Justification

• Real-time tourism data can help you present a complete economic picture by combining hotel and STR performance rather than relying on partial reports.
• Clear, current data allows you to brief stakeholders with confidence.
• When residents raise concerns about traffic, lodging density, or visitor behavior, use factual booking and occupancy data to make more convincing arguments on what is actually happening in the destination.

4. Policy and Regulation Support

• When STR availability, occupancy, and demand are known, regulation debates can be based on real-time STR market insights.
• Policy makers can rely on occupancy, supply growth, and booking trends to shape guidelines or tax frameworks that reflect actual market conditions instead of outdated estimates.

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What to Look for in a Tourism Data Solution

Comprehensive Coverage

• A complete view of visitation requires data for all lodging types, especially as STRs increasingly represent a meaningful share of total guest nights in U.S. destinations. 
• In several markets, the STR supply chain increased by around 15% in a single year, while demand rose only 11%, reshaping occupancy patterns and revenue potential.

Direct-Source Data

• Direct PMS-connected reservation data eliminates common errors in scraped listings, such as inflated occupancy due to owner blocks or seasonally inconsistent rates.

Geographic Granularity

• Fine-grained views reveal how different parts of a destination perform.
• A neighborhood may show strong demand even when the citywide average appears flat—an insight that can help in target marketing or managing growth.

Forward-Looking Booking Pace

• Reservations on the books allow you to anticipate demand before visitors arrive.
• It’s essential because industry data shows that around 40% of hotel bookings are made within seven days of arrival and that roughly 44% of U.S. leisure travellers book at the last minute, reshaping how destinations track and forecast demand.

Easy and Efficient Reporting

• Exportable, visual reports make it simple to communicate economic impact, justify budgets, and answer questions from city councils, boards, and stakeholders.

Benchmarking Capability

• Comparing your destination to regional peers or similar markets can help you determine whether performance shifts are due to internal factors or broader industry patterns.
• Advanced and comprehensive platforms like Key Data offer custom and enhanced benchmarking capabilities built on verified reservation data.

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Complete Data, Complete Strategy

Modern destination marketing depends on modern data. As a DMO, you’re expected to measure and know the total visitor impact, justify budgets, and guide economic growth with accuracy, which requires real-time insights.

STR intelligence is a core component of understanding visitor behavior, market demand, and lodging performance across destinations. 

The most effective way to increase visitor share in today’s competitive market is to have complete visibility into the lodging landscape and the agility to act on real-time insights.

Are you ready to see how comprehensive tourism data can support your goals? Contact us today to learn how regional and destination-level insights can turn uncertainty into clarity or request a demo to explore the benefits of real-time tourism data.