Collection of real-time data is positioning Forwardkeys.com company as a innovative tool to NTOs and the travel industry- stake holders. Demonstration was done during the Mekong Tourism Forum by Olivier Jager, his CEO.
CHIANG RAI- Travel industry data company ForwardKeys.com is a service from Forward Data S.L., a private entity registered in Spain in 2008 which focuses on travel industry data optimization and distribution. “We realize that many data collected by NTOs do not provide a totally accurate vision on travellers’ movements. They generally just know when a traveller enters the country thanks to accounting at immigration desks. But then there is little scientific information about real movements of those travellers”, explains Olivier Jager, Co-founder and CEO of ForwardKeys.com.
ForwardKeys.com gets into a new dimension for data collection. “We sit on a database of air reservation information that we aggregate daily from Online and Off-line travel agencies around the world. It helps us to track not only the present but also future movements of travellers. We can for example see the emergence of a destination within a country, transit movements to other destinations etc. Thanks to those data, marketing organisations, tourism boards or hotel chains can monitor historical and future arrivals from any source market to any destination”, indicates Olivier Jager.
ForwardKeys.com adds then a new tactical dimension to a management’s approach. “We were for example to track up movements following the tsunami in Japan or the floods in Thailand. For example, we monitored international air reservations to Bangkok collapsing by 39.2% from October 10 to November 25 last year at the height of the floods in the capital city”, adds Jager.
Forwardkeys.com was even able to determine that the peak in bookings decline was reached on October 28, down by 137% compared to the same day of 2010. Recovery was on the way from November 15 with bookings dropping “only” in a range of 7% to 20%. Looking at future bookings from dates collected until November 25, ForwardKeys could anticipate a recovery from January to Thai airports outside Bangkok (+ 7.3%) and from February at Bangkok Airport (+1.4%).
At the MTF, Jager then looked at the situation of long-haul markets in the Greater Mekong Subregion. Air reservations from long-haul markets (excluding Asia) point to highly-concentrated demand: December to March represent a market share of 41% of all arrivals to the region. While Thailand and Vietnam represent the bulk of all arrivals with a respective market share of 76% and 18% from June 2011 to May 2012, the strongest growth within the GMS was recorded for Myanmar with arrivals up by 35% over the same period of time. Another interesting indication is the big share of Europe into long haul arrivals to the GMS. According to aggregated data from ForwadKeys, Europe had a market share of 62% in total arrivals to Mekong countries compared to 37% for all Southeast Asia. Myanmar had by then the largest market share of Europeans at 77% followed by Thailand at 64%. And anticipating future movements to the GMS through bookings, Jager expects total arrivals to increase by 20% from June to August 2012 compared to 2011. Myanmar will once more be the shining star in the GMS with demand up by 54%…
Table: Top 10 source countries for GMS according to ForwardKeys.com
Luc Citrinot a French national is a freelance journalist and consultant in tourism and air transport with over 20 years experience. Based in Paris and Bangkok, he works for various travel and air transport trade publications in Europe and Asia.
