GfK and the National Association of Travel Agents (NATAS) Singapore have agreed to collaborate on the provision of dynamic travel-related insights for the Singapore tourism sector.
Under the agreement, participating NATAS travel agent members will provide GfK with weekly consolidated, live booking data for its Travelscan report, which is based on consolidated and aggregated industry booking data, and is used by travel agents to better predict market developments and increase their efficiency.
Laurens van den Oever: Collaboration brings value to NATAS members,
“We are very pleased to collaborate with NATAS in this, as it will indeed bring value to all its members, while at the same time also support GfK’s mission to provide accurate, reliable and updated market data for the travel and hospitality industry,” said Laurens van den Oever, GfK’s global director of travel of GfK Asia Pte Lt.d.
GfK began laying the foundation for Travelscan last year by securing partnerships with 10 major players in the travel sector. Companies including Scoot, Expedia, Flight Centre and others have already started to provide inputs on their respective forward booking transactions into the GfK Travelscan platform. The latest development with NATAS is anticipated to encourage even more of its members to join the programme.
“Market data in the travel industry is often very fragmented with no real comparative way of measurement,” said Ang Eu Khoon, chairman for information technology of NATAS.
“This collaboration with GfK to convert the massive amount of available booking data into relevant market insights that are easy to understand will definitely help our members understand the travel industry better and help advance it to the next level in a rapidly changing business environment.”
Besides Singapore, the company is also expanding its travel expertise to other countries across Asia Pacific. The first integrated travel report for Singapore is anticipated to be ready by end-June 2015.
Meanwhile, GfK also announced during ITB Berlin a partnership with provider of travel intelligence ForwardKeys to bundle their travel and hospitality knowledge for a more holistic view of the travel supply chain.
The partnership is aimed at jointly developing solutions for the industry and bundling each other’s data-science capabilities. The companies will merge their expertise on monitoring travel booking behavior and gaining consumer insights across the increased number of channels consumers are using nowadays to plan and book their trips and holidays.
“For an industry that is constantly looking to increase its profitability, our tools start by answering some very fundamental questions: What is the potential of the market? How is air flight capacity being utilised? What will travel demands be in the coming months; based on live, forward bookings for each destination around the globe?” said Olivier Jager, founder of ForwardKeys.
The Spain-based company focuses on big data and business intelligence for the travel industry, drawn from anonymized and aggregated global Air reservation information. ForwardKeys’ core areas of expertise are complementary to GfK’s, with the result that more in-depth and meaningful insights into the dynamic and fast growing tourism market are possible.
“I’m very excited we can solve another piece of the puzzle by providing an additional layer of relevant insights,” Van den oever added. “This partnership strengthens GfK’s strategy of integrating data from very different sources to turn them into smart business decisions.”
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