Mercat Tours – Data in action

Mercat Tours is a tour company that has started business by offering walking tours through Edinburgh’s Old Town with its historic characters and settings. Constantly looking to diversify their product offering, they now provide a wide range of guided walking tours in and around Scotland.

When it comes to using customer data, one of the first things they look at is their visitors’ country of origin. Since they developed tours in French, German and Spanish, they need to continuously ensure that there are enough visitors for them to continue to run those tours. Hence, their visitor data needs to be continuously monitored to ensure ongoing demand for their products.

Customer dataset insights further allow them to identify countries for which they don’t currently offer tours in their native language but are getting a lot of visitors from. Identifying a rise in Italian tourists to their tours, and the city of Edinburgh as a whole, encouraged them to develop tours in the Italian language. To do this, Mercat Tours used their own data as well as data from other organisations such as Visit Scotland to corroborate market demand assumptions and to make decisions about new product developments.

Activity

Put yourself in the shoes of Mercat Tours and imagine you were leading these insights to develop the new Italian tour (product).

What internal and external data points might have been useful to inform the decision to create a new product?

Mindmap the datapoints. Print and use the template provided, or draw your own, then share an image of your mindmap on the Padlet board for others to see. From the Padlet, click or tap the big pink (+) button at the bottom of the page to start posting. Need help using Padlet? See this Guide on how to post to padlet.

Alternatively, post some ideas to the comments section.