Rove Marketing is a leading travel and tourism data and analytics company powered by a team that come from DMOs, hotels, airlines, agencies, and startups — all attracted by a passion for tourism.
Rove explains that they “don’t build ads, implement campaigns, or buy media.” Rather, they provide solutions through insights to help tackle the tough business challenges of managing a tourism organization and building operational muscle to reach full potential.
The Travel Vertical talked to James Sauter, Co-founder, in Toronto to learn more about Rove Marketing.
Q: Tell us about Rove’s Destination Insights Platform. How is it different to the other tools?
A: Our vision was to bring to tourism the most advanced Destination Insights Platform that could meet the needs of DMOs large and small at an affordable price. To achieve this, we partnered with Domo to build a complete and easy-to-use business intelligence solution that combines and transforms the ocean of tourism data into actionable insights to inform better business decisions at every level.
Our Destination Insights Platform is an end-to-end business intelligence solution designed for destinations using Domo’s industry leading technology. It allows you to pull all your data together regardless of where it sits, centrally manage and prepare the data easily, while empowering everyone with insights. You can even do it all on your smart phone – through the app!
Q: Regardless of how far along the data journey a DMO may be, how can Rove help accelerate that journey and realize their data goals?
A: A big part of our value proposition is accessibility – meaning how affordable the platform is and how easy it is to use. We’ve often heard that budgets were a barrier and that’s never been truer during COVID, but it’s also never been more important to harness data to make more informed decisions. It is about time the technology becomes affordable and easy to use so DMOs of all sizes can become data driven.
The platform is also incredibly flexible. We design the platform, so it’s completely tailored to meet a DMOs specific needs from data integrations with your current technologies, to data portability allowing organizations to seamlessly share their data internally and externally with industry partners and stakeholders.
Finally, no pun intended but we help accelerate that data journey with our speed of implementation. It’s not uncommon to hear of a BI platform implementation taking half a year or longer. With the pressure DMOs are facing recovering from the pandemic, those timelines do not work anymore. Our target is to get clients started within a few weeks with their most pressing needs.
Q: How is data informing recovery strategies?
A: Most DMOs we speak with are focused on their recovery plans. There is no playbook for what we are all facing today. Traditional datasets are incomplete, targets are impossible to set, and resources are thinned out. So how do you build back better?
Each destination is different in terms of needs and circumstances, but one common thread exists among the most successful DMOs and that is the use of data to make informed decisions. The saying goes, when a plan is made, fear disappears. We see successful DMOs recovering from the pandemic because they used data to develop and monitor their plan. As a result, they are making decisions with confidence and efficiency.
Q: How does a destination determine what data is more useful in navigating the recovery?
A: Every destination is in a different situation and so the answer depends on a lot of things. We’ve seen lot of valuable information come from mobile location data, short-term rental data, and of course online search data without mentioning traditional marketing data. But it’s not all about promotion, destination development will play a big role in driving expenditures and on this front, we see rating and review data, sales data, and lead generation data being critical KPIs to monitor.
Q: What makes Rove different?
A: Our biggest contribution to our clients is helping them make better decisions. The emphasis in that sentence is on THEM (and not better). We think it is important for organizations to own their Data IP, and that includes the ability and processes that derive insights to make better decisions.
The secret sauce is not the data. It is not the BI platform. It is bringing the data to life so within a few instinctive clicks, you have got the data you needed at the right time to the right person to make the right decision. And on that we are relentless.
Request a demo:
Destination Insights | DMO Insights | Rove (rovemarketing.ca)
DMO Testimonials:
“Rove’s platform is our one-stop shop when we’re looking for any kind of analytical insight. It’s been hugely beneficial to our decision-making process and allowed our organization to operate with greater sophistication.” —Leslie Bruce, President & CEO Banff & Lake Louise Tourism
“Anyone can pull data, but actually analyzing it and getting a key takeaway was challenging. We needed a way to visualize the data and tell a story that provided actionable insights.” — Jackie Tenuta, Director of Strategy and Development, Travel Manitoba
“As an association, we need to provide our members with access to the best technology and data to help them make decisions. Rove’s Destination Insights Platform makes it easy for our members to access and share data that enables more efficient collaboration to build back tourism in the state.” — Christine Hoffer, COO of New York State Tourism Industry Association
