Amadeus is looking to tap a new segment as it extends data it traditionally provides for the airline community and travel agents to destination marketing organisations.

The company has unveiled technology targeting DMOs, called Destination Insight, which aims to help them improve their marketing campaigns via the use of “near real-time” insight.

Head of Amadeus Travel Intelligence Pascal Clement says the technology, which has been a couple of years in the works, will provide DMOs with more visibility on who is coming, when and why.

“We realised DMOs were driving blind for most of what they were doing. They’re investing in marketing efforts based on past data and most of the time manually.”

This is a new segment for Amadeus and it also plans to combine the data with its Travel Intelligence advertising service for a more complete offering.

Visit Flanders is one of the first destination marketing organisations to benefit from the technology.

Clement says it has enabled the DMO to gain visibility on the destinations it is competing with and the best time to launch campaigns as well as react to events.

While funding has always been an issue for destination marketing companies, Clements says the technology will enable them to make better spending decisions.

Destination Insight currently has is two parts:

• Top view will provide insight into searches, booking information, length of stay and air capacity
• Navigator provides information on historical and current travel agency booking data

Going forward Amadeus will look at the potential to add more sources of data to the service such as social media and localisation data.

The company has already worked on several pilots using Twitter.

A white paper ‘Smart decisions for smart destinations using big data’ can be viewed here.