Tuesday Tactics: Re-Opening - Forecasting Future Visitor Demand
As the public health sector responds to the COVID-19 crisis, public park agencies are called to respond. The purpose of the Tuesday Blog is simple: to provide you with strategies that assist you, your agency and your partners with a mutually beneficial way forward.
Photo: @rpnickson
Re-Opening: Forecasting Visitor Demand
Americans love to travel and are eager to get out of their houses. Guidance for reopening recreation sites focuses on staying close to home. This allows the public to manage its visitor experience in a healthy and safe way. Tracking and forecasting visitor demand is possible through the building of visitor demand models that integrate a combination of existing in-house data and external industry sources.
Here are three pieces of data you can leverage to forecast your visitor demand scenarios.
Monthly Visitation: The data available on hand is typically by park, and by day use and overnight demand. Evaluate your visitation data on a weekday and weekend basis and assess if in the past month there have been any changes in when your visitors came to your parks. Determine if these changes, if any, are meaningful enough to rely on for use in future forecasting. Next, take last year’s visitation data (e.g. May to October) and identify the percentage of weekday and weekend visitation by overnight and day use. Consider applying what you discovered from the last month in your estimates of future demand. Recognize that if your state/local policies require visitor capacity limits going forward, you will need to evaluate the impact it will have on your visitor capacity and hence visitation (e.g., If you are going to manage visitor capacity via parking, you would evaluate parking capacity and identify a reasonable turn over factor).
Reservation Data: Pull your historical overnight lodging reservation data from your system and stratify it by type of overnight lodging. Pull the data apart and prioritize the data by the overnight accommodations you may have open (e.g., RV Parks) and then look at the sites you will plan to open later (e.g. Cabins, Lodges, Tent Sites) and evaluate any changes in supply (e.g. reduce # of tents site, close down cabins for an extra day of cleaning, etc.). Identify your historical occupied site nights by type and by month, as well as average length of stay, and the zip codes of your reservations. This data will be needed to forecast any demand changes.
Industry Travel Metric Trends. The Arrivalist is currently providing free access to their travel index, which provides road travel tracking by day, by state and by travel distances. The free access begins in January of this year and provides insight as to how travel has fallen off but also how and where it is incrementally increasing. Since most of your visitation will be by car, tracking this barometer against your visitation trends could be a useful tool to use in applying changes to your day and overnight usage.
Every commercial recreation provider is undertaking scenario analysis of their demand and its impact on revenue and expenses. They are doing this to make budgetary decisions and to manage cash flow. This general description of the demand forecasting process represents a best practice and can be efficiently done with current data. Let us know how we can help you “estimate visitor demand”.
Next Tuesday Tactics, Revenue Forecasting and Cost Recovery Analysis!
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