With Australian tourism relying heavily on domestic travel till at least mid-2022, Hemisphere Digital has come up with a novel data solution to provide accessible, ready-made insights on how Australians travel and spend.

Designed and developed in Australia by Mike Welling, Hemisphere Digital was awarded a $1 million Federal Government grant as part of the Business Research Innovation and Initiative program earlier this year to create a novel solution for accessing intelligent tourism data.

Mr Welling said that the BRII grant enabled his team to develop a visitation and tourism insights platform that was unrivalled internationally. The tech platform has wide application across the tourism sector, from quantifying the success of tourism recovery efforts at a policy level, right down to the hyperlocal impact of adventure tourism activities to natural areas.

The Hemisphere Digital next generation geospatial intelligence platform has attracted investment internationally due to its global potential.

 Chris Jagger, Managing Partner of Ampliphi Ventures who led Hemisphere’s recent fundraising round, commented, “Having invested in a number of geospatial and cloud/edge software solutions across the USA and Australasia, we were really impressed by what Mike and the team have developed with Hemisphere.

 "It is a ground-breaking platform that has relevance not only for the tourism industry globally, but also other industries that need better, faster and more actionable customer and market insights. Of critical importance, Hemisphere has solved the use of data in a privacy-compliant manner.”

 “By combining transactional, telecommunications, social media and other forms of digitally sourced data into a comprehensive set of tourism benchmarks, Hemisphere Digital opened up the potential for users to quickly identify the impact of tourism and population movements across a number of key metrics in near real time,” Mr Welling said.

The tool has since been used and tested by a number of large organisations during the pre- commercial launch phase, including by government institutions, state tourism agencies and other partners. It has seen the transformational impact that having access to real data insights can have on businesses looking to access population movements, spend patterns and shifting visitor behaviours.

How it works

Multiple data sources have been integrated into the Hemisphere Digital analytics platform, giving users insights across visitation, expenditure, sentiment (such as through reviews), accommodation listings and market research data.

All data sources are 100% privacy compliant and come from a variety of sources including mobile phone data, financial transactions, publisher reviews and accommodation listings owners, as well as research data including international and domestic tourism behaviours.
Hemisphere Digital’s vision was to make data accessible to the entire tourism data supply chain, from Governments right down to small businesses and tour operators.

 “It is our hope that access to affordable and insightful data can become a transformative vehicle for economic and social benefit right when it is needed most in a heavily disrupted tourism sector. We believe that the tourism industry can and should use new forms of data to support sustainable tourism goals, and to de-risk impacts from over-tourism of our natural and cultural heritage. Hemisphere demystifies data and supports businesses of all sizes to glean the information they need to drive innovation and sustainable outcomes for businesses and society,” Mr Welling said.

The Regional Profiler module presents a streamlined way to access multiple data points across a specific region, including visitation, expenditure and sentiment metrics and identifies patterns in near real time, which can be used to continuously report the impact of tourism, alongside year-on- year and even month-on-month benchmarks.”

The Event Analysis module also offers the fastest way to determine the impact of events, including major festivals, sporting events, or holiday periods, as well as natural disasters and macro-economic factors to the local tourism economy; providing businesses a swift and effective way to measure the success of events, with the ability to forecast the ROI of future events.

The Event Analysis covers attendance, expenditure and sentiment and allows other data sets such as accommodation occupancy to be presented side by side in an easy to access data visualisation.

The Digital Data module allows organisations to analyse their web traffic alongside physical visitation. They can gain a better understanding of marketing effectiveness of digital performance campaigns at achieving tourism growth targets.

BRII is currently seeking novel RegTech solutions. Find more information on this year’s challenge, closing on 3 June, here.

Find more information on Hemisphere Digital here.

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