Six Research Ideas Your Destination Should Be Considering

Data and insight inform so much of what destination marketers do—but having the right research means thinking beyond traditional methods. Whether qualitative, quantitative, or both, your research must serve a purpose. Understanding your options is as important as understanding why you’re engaging in research in the first place.

These six research methods aren’t in every destination’s toolkit, but they absolutely can be. Consider the advantages of each one and then get ready to see how fresh insight can fuel your success. 

1. Perception Research

This type of quantitative research is useful for establishing foundational metrics and benchmarks to guide your destination marketing and messaging. By understanding the perceptions and misperceptions of your target audiences, you can easily make decisions that lead to actual results, regardless of the goals. 

Whether you are seeking to attract leisure travelers, the travel trade, journalists, or business travelers, knowing what each target audience thinks—and how to best communicate with them—is critical to achieving that.

Focus groups are a key way to dig deeper into your quantitative perception studies and understand exactly what your audiences think about your destination.

2. Mystery Shopper

It’s not just for consumer products! Mystery shoppers are a powerful way to understand how residents, industry employees, and other destination stakeholders interact with current visitors.

This type of research puts boots on the ground to engage with your destination’s workforce and local community. Mystery shoppers—essentially “visitors” that you send to trial your destination’s offerings—will report back to understand what works and what doesn’t. 

It opens up learning opportunities for stakeholders to do better and streamline your destination’s messaging for target audiences.

3. Gap Analysis

This essential qualitative analysis looks not just at what your destination is doing well but also at what it’s not doing at all. A gap analysis will uncover what products or experiences your visitors are looking for compared to what’s available from your competitors. 

An analysis of this type identifies opportunities that destinations may have never considered. Therefore, it presents you with powerful insight to create and invest in new offerings in direct response to what travelers and visitors are seeking.

4. Omnibus Survey

Your destination stakeholders can all get in on the research action with a semi-regular omnibus survey. A few varied questions sent to target audiences each quarter can help track awareness and sentiment of your destination and will help you “course correct” if your messaging seems to be missing the mark.

These tend to be short questionnaires that track feedback on a regular basis. They can be cost-effective ways to partner with other entities in your city or country that may want to know more about the people visiting. They are effective touchpoints, offering destination research snapshots between more extensive research studies.

5. Web Intercept Survey

Placing a short survey on your website is an easy way to track those who are interested in your destination. It allows you to obtain information that can help build out a better profile of visitors to the site and how visiting the site has changed their intent to visit, their length of stay, and their spending, among a host of other attributes.

This method allows ongoing passive research without having to reach out to survey participants actively.

6. Rankings Analysis and Strategy

People love comparing through lists. A rankings analysis allows you to see and share where your destination ranks in national or international rankings. It will reveal where you score well, where you are underperforming, and what rankings people pay attention to using the SEMrush Authority Score.

Knowing these takeaways will allow you to develop a strategy for improving your position in rankings where you are underperforming.

Looking to grow your destination’s research ideas? With more than 60 years in the business, DCI knows how to ask the right questions to acquire the right insight. Get in touch with Robyn Domber at robyn.domber@aboutdci.com to learn more about tapping into DCI’s research team.