Destination promotion and management organizations must innovate and adapt to face the upheavals in the tourism world. What new roles and responsibilities do they need to take on? We met Bastien Di Cristofaro, Digital, Data & Communication Manager at La Tangente to talk to us about their new business model.
On our tourism planet, adaptation and innovation are the key words to deal with changing markets, crises and upheavals.
Destination promotion and management organizations (DMO/OGD) are no exception. Moreover, their business model, roles and responsibilities are increasingly being questioned. Some are paving the way for a change that promises to be lasting, by abandoning the promotion of their territory in favor of assertive support for tourism businesses to support their development.
This is the case of La Tangente, Northern Tourism Innovation Agency. Like a “start-up”, this Departmental Tourism Committee (CDT) of the Department of Nord in France undertook a pivot of its business model in 2020. It abandoned its mandate to promote the destination to its customer markets in favor of a 100% B2B shift.
We spoke with Bastien Di Cristofaro, Digital, Data & Communication Manager at La Tangente. We were more than curious to know more about this transition and their service offer dedicated to tourism players.
New business model and brand image
In France, CDTs are institutional organizations that act at the level of their department, essentially for the promotion and marketing of the tourist offer in their territory. Business support is a related service offered by many of them. In recent years, the CDT of the North Department has undertaken a review that led it to the observation that the regional organization (Regional Tourism and Convention Committee) and tourist offices were better placed than him to carry out marketing actions than him.
Thus, since last summer, the CDT has changed its brand image to become La Tangente, a tourism innovation agency in the North. Legally, the agency maintains the status of CDT and the same funding by the territorial authority of the department. But its services have been reoriented towards all tourism players (public and private), with an emphasis on support in their innovation approaches. The agency's ambition is to bridge the gap between the world of tourism and innovation.
Professionalization of the team, at the heart of their raison d'être
The main link in this change was the development of the team's skills. Restructuring proved necessary in order to develop expertise. The entire team has been transformed: new collaborators have been recruited, members of the existing team have been trained and others have left the organization. At the same time, a training plan (online and by video) was set up, in order to equip the team with innovative methods of project management, animation and digital technology.
Today, there are 15 employees with well-defined expertise and skills, a number that is a dream for a local organization in Canada! Here are some of the positions:
- Data, digital & communication manager
- Innovation & design coach
- Entrepreneur coach
- Communication & Editorial Manager
- Marketing & digital project manager
- Culture/itinerance/accommodation/sustainable development project manager
- Watch Manager/Trends
The following excerpt from their “State of Mind” published on their website is indicative of a different approach and strong beliefs:
“The tourism ecosystem is undergoing multiple evolutions, dictated by new consumption patterns and the digitalization of the economy. (...) With the Department of the North, we are therefore convinced that it is necessary to anticipate these changes and generate opportunities for innovation within your organizations and territories. For this, it is essential to Dedicate a structure bringing together specific expertise and methodologies such as data science, design thinking, implementation, open innovation, agile approaches and creativity methodologies ”.
A range of services that make sense
La Tangente focuses its services on:
- Project support, with a focus on diversifying and adapting the offer, which is particularly appropriate since COVID.
- Networking with other actors in the tourism ecosystem, for example to test a new offer or service and to obtain advice from an expert in a specific sector of activity.
- The development of strategic knowledge, through monitoring and trend articles, webinars, studies, toolkits for digital transformation, etc. And what particularly caught our attention: a tourist observatory combined with a service to support companies to better manage their data.
What is the Data Lab?
Bastien Di Cristofaro and his team are in the process of setting up a Data Lab, which brings together all the agency's databases and data processing or dissemination tools. These will then be made available to actors on the territory in order to support them in their activities.
The team aims to aggregate and process a multitude of data sources on the platform. Opendatasoft, by type of category (clientele, attendance, offer, etc.). Data comes from a variety of sources: TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Airbnb, Airbnb, Google My Business, Google Travel Insights, territorial WiFi, road traffic, weather, DataTourism, etc.
The primary objective is to have an up-to-date picture of tourism supply and demand. La Tangente also wants to refine the data at the level of each territory and sector of activity, which would make it possible, for example, to calculate the economic weight of tourism or to develop forecasts of attendance.
As you will have understood, this approach requires real expertise in open data management. When it comes to identifying the tourist offer of a destination, accessible technologies already exist, such as Apidae in France or MyCity in Switzerland, which also has an office in Montreal. For its part, the Quebec Ministry of Tourism announced last January have chosen the Tourinsoft tourist information system for the entire TA network.
Creation of a customer data analysis tool
Among the Data Lab projects, the team set up a pilot project to collect data from visitors in tourist offices. Thanks to the tool AirTable, the reception staff asks questions to each visitor (age, group composition, length of stay, etc.) and enters the answers into a questionnaire. Data is compiled in real time and integrated into graphs and tables.
Thus, the first tourist offices benefiting from the tool have a map of traffic flows, the profile and behavior of their visitors. For its part, La Tangente can consult the data from all the offices to get a global picture. Once this stage has been established, the team would like to extend the approach to businesses, by developing an in-house solution via a member area on their website. The team dreams of a real CRM at the territorial level, nothing less!
An inspiring model for here?
We presented the La Tangente model to you because we are convinced that these agents of change pave the way for a redistribution of roles and responsibilities between regional and local promotion and development organizations. In a logic of pooling efforts between actors, this initiative is intended to be inspiring to nourish your thoughts and initiate discussions.
If you want to know more about La Tangente, or to know other models of this kind, do not hesitate to contact us!
A big thank you to Bastien Di Cristofaro for agreeing to our interview and sharing this information on the career and projects of La Tangente!