Tourism Australia
Case Study
An optimised, automated, end-to-end solution utilising
Azure Data Platform, Synapse, and Power BI
About Tourism Australia
Tourism Australia gears for growth with intelligent analytics platform. Before the pandemic, tourism was a multi-billion dollar sector of the Australian economy. Now as the sector whirrs back to life, Tourism Australia is freshly empowered with a data and analytics platform developed on Azure by Agile Analytics that is saving the agency 80 hours a month and providing important insights to ensure its resources are allocated where they will have maximum impact.
In a typical year, tourism contributes around $60 billion to Australia’s GDP thanks to around 9 million international visitors as well as locals travelling the length and breadth of this wide brown land.
We’ve not had a typical year for a while, but Tourism Australia is gearing up for the next normal.
Tourism Australia is the Australian Government agency responsible for attracting international visitors to Australia, both for leisure and business. Active in 15 key markets Tourism Australia has also returned to domestic tourism marketing to support the industry as it navigates its way back from the pandemic.
It’s an important industry employing up to 666,000 people – the challenge for Tourism Australia is knowing where it can leverage its marketing and partnership model to have most impact
The Challenge
To understand where to deploy its resources most effectively, Tourism Australia needs a good grasp of accurate and up-to-the-minute data – who’s heading our way, when will they arrive, what will they want to do, where will they want to go?
The organisation’s research and strategy team regularly fielded these sorts of questions – tying up many hours and valuable resources as people turned their hand to extracting the right data from the right sources.
More than ten different data sources, many using different formats, had to be scoured manually in order to respond to a request.
Now, an intelligent data and analytics platform has been built and deployed allowing self-serve analytics for many of the agency’s ad hoc requests – freeing the research and strategy team for more value adding strategically focussed work.
The Solution
Providing an Automated Solution
Microsoft Gold Partner Agile Analytics built the Azure based platform, providing Tourism Australia staff and executives with fingertip access to data regarding traveller sentiment and demand. The system was five months in development, and started to be rolled out in May 2021, with the full system deployed by July.
According to Lauren Coombes, Tourism Australia Insights Executive; “Tourism Australia commissioned Agile Analytics to assist with centralising a range of data sources to help better align and drive strategic decision making. This has allowed us to increase our team efficiency by drawing on insights across a broad range of data sets in the one dashboard that were previously very hands on, taking hours to pull together
The Outcome
Tourism Australia has been able to use insights gleaned from the mass of information to help with strategic planning, most recently during State and Territory border reopenings, and to direct marketing investment as Australia’s international borders opened for travellers.
Built on Microsoft Azure, the platform leverages Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, and Azure SQL with insights about bookings, searches, flights and visitor surveys delivered through Power BI reports.
It’s saving the team around 80 hours a month and providing streamlined access to data needed to make strategic decisions to help Australia’s tourism sector return to full strength.
Tourism Australia plans to extend its analytics capability by bringing in additional data sources, as well as external information, to build an increasingly comprehensive understanding of how to best support one of Australia’s most important economic sectors.
Project showcase
During the monthly Power BI user group meet up, Agile Analytics and Tourism Australia shared insights and provided a showcase of the project.
In this recording you will learn how the project was initiated, the solutions that were built and some examples of the reporting and how they were deployed. This session is highly relevant for both Power BI users but more specifically businesses (particularly in the tourism industry) who want to streamline their operation while continuing to innovate
Built on Microsoft Power BI and Azure Data Platform
Azure SQL
Azure Data factory
Synapse
Power BI
