The Destination NSW Westpac Tourism Expenditure Monitor will deliver valuable insights from aggregated, de-identified visitor data for the NSW tourism industry to attract more visitors by understanding how people spend money when they travel throughout the State.
Destination NSW CEO Sandra Chipchase said, "Tourism is big business and a vital industry to our State's economy, employing over 171,000 people in NSW and delivering nearly $33 billion in overnight visitor spend in the year ending March 2019."
"If you can't measure, you can't manage and this new tool is another tourism breakthrough in providing the NSW Government and industry accurate and valuable analysis of spending data that has been stripped of any personal information.
"This initiative is crucial to equip our industry, particularly in rural and remote areas of NSW, with traveller spending data analysis and insights to ensure we remain Australia's number one tourist destination."
The deal brokered by Destination NSW, the State's tourism and major events agency, sees its tourism expertise and insights linked with Westpac's leading data analytics capability.
The Destination NSW Westpac Tourism Expenditure Monitor will provide a variety of research metrics using de-identified and aggregated data. Each report will highlight changes from month-to-month and trends over time to reveal:
- How many people are visiting and travelling within NSW
- Where the travellers are from
- Demographic details of those travellers to and within NSW
- Visitor spending patterns, including emerging trends across rural, regional and metropolitan NSW.
The program will assist the NSW tourism industry, including operators and agencies, in gaining a deeper understanding about what drives visitors to local communities, where they are coming from and how their spending patterns contribute to the NSW Visitor Economy.
The data comprises millions of monthly transactions, tracking the geographical location of where money is spent against tourism services. These insights have not previously been possible using traditional survey methodology and are exclusive to Destination NSW and Westpac.
Di Challenor, General Manager of Global Transaction Services at Westpac said this is an industry-leading example of Westpac's drive to collaborate with customers to deliver meaningful, client-focused services, and help them to achieve their long-term strategic financial goals.
"At Westpac, we have made multiple investments focusing on consumer privacy, customer-centric technology and data analysis capabilities to safely, securely and responsibly develop insights from it," Ms Challenor said.
"We are committed to our partnership with Destination NSW, which is setting the benchmark for others and is renowned for ensuring NSW is one of the world's premier tourism and major events destinations."
Destination NSW will review this information to leverage insights, which we will soon make available to industry.
