James is Partner and Co-founder of Rove Marketing, a leading tourism data, analytics, and consulting firm. They are focused on helping tourism organizations become more data-driven, so they are better positioned to navigate change, maximize travel visitation, and ultimately drive revenue growth.

He brings over 20 years of strategic knowledge in CRM, customer experience management, data and analytics, branding, and digital marketing strategy.

Destination on the Left is joined by James Sauter, a partner and co-founder of Rove Marketing. Rove is a leading tourism data, analytics, and consulting firm focused on helping tourism organizations become more data-driven, so they are better positioned to navigate change, maximize travel visitation, and ultimately drive revenue growth. On our podcast, James talks about how destinations are using mobile location data to inform their early recovery plans, how residents sentiment data can help with recovery and rebuilding and how collaboration will fuel the future of tourism.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• James’ vision with Rove and the services they offer
• The two areas in which Rove works with tourism organizations to help them utilize data
• How Rove has used data to help tourism organizations navigate the pandemic
• The tourism dashboards Rove is building all over the world, and how they work
• How Rove is tracking resident sentiment to support destinations and drive tourism traffic
• How mobile location data and other sources are being used creatively to help destinations recover
• What role data will play in transforming destinations to fit the “new normal”
• How this data collection and analysis process will eventually be able to span multiple destinations and entire regions

Rove Marketing

James Sauter is a partner and co-founder of Rove Marketing. Rove is a leading tourism data, analytics, and consulting firm focused on helping tourism organizations become more data-driven, so they are better positioned to navigate change, maximize travel visitation, and ultimately drive revenue growth. On our podcast, James talks about how destinations are using mobile location data to inform their early recovery plans, how residents sentiment data can help with recovery and rebuilding and how collaboration will fuel the future of tourism. He explains how we can better use data to plan for the future during these uncertain times.

The Power of Data Collection

Before COVID, everything pointed to massive growth in the tourism industry. It was a major opportunity for Rove to get in on the ground floor and help tourism organizations make better decisions by leveraging data technology and their insights. They accomplish this by providing full-service consulting and data collection services under one roof. And data collection is more important now than ever. It has played a huge role in understanding what is happening in the travel industry as consumer trends/government regulations change. Using that information, DMOs can plan the best course of action and pivot as needed.

How to Use the Data You Collect

One of the areas where James’ team found its stride was with mobile location data. As we work through this fragmented reopening process, it is important to know where people are, where they’re visiting within a location, how long they’re staying, and their demographic. This can help destinations drastically during the early stages of recovery. They are also using creativity to leverage data in other ways, such as sourcing rating and review information. Rove can pull all of the reviews for restaurants, hotels, attractions, etc. and put them into a scale to track performance. Obviously, when COVID hit, there was a dip in data for this tool, but everything is proving extremely valuable as tourism reopens.

• Website: www.rovemarketing.ca
• LinkedIn:
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamessauter/
  • https://www.linkedin.com/company/rove-marketing/
• Email: james.sauter@rovemarketing.ca

Episode Transcript

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