Information is power and at ForwardKeys® we are committed to providing decision makers with unique tactical information on travel trends.

In case you have purchased multiple datasets from ForwardKeys, you can access them by hovering over the dataset menu on the upper left corner of your screen:

 

Step 1 – Decide your analysis needs

What analysis would you like to do?

 

 

Understand the numbers that you will be reading in query results:

 

 

Options to check the volume of arrivals as well as different combinations of possible calculations are available for Overnights module users in the top menus of the screen for most of the sections; however, in Benchmark section, only Overnights volume is available.

Hover your mouse over the “star” button [B] and you will be able to view and click to select the following express options:

 

 

Step 2 – Set up parameters and run a query

 

Upon clicking into a section, you will find the query parameter panel on the left side of your screen. Based on your contractual specifications, either Arrivals or Overnights module will be available.

Basic set of parameters are available by default, while two more sets of parameters are available according to your “Expertise Levels”: “Standard”, and “Advanced”.

The “Basic” panel contains essential and most frequently used parameters, while “Standard” and “Advanced” panels will display additional parameters based on your contractual specifications, allowing for more in-depth analyses.

Set up parameters in “Basic” panel

Point of Interest (POI)

Your destination(s) (and your competitor destinations) are the Point of Interests of your analysis. Available locations in Point of Interest are based on your contractual specifications.

Choose one location, or multiple locations to be grouped together, for your analysis. In the “Quick Search” field, you can type the names of the locations of interest and select them as they appear.

Lengths of stay at POI

This parameter helps to differentiate passengers according to their length of stay at the destination of your interest.

To analyse “tourists” in your destination(s), please select from 1 to 22+ nights.

To analyse “transfer passengers” in your destination(s), please select short to long transfers.

Under Arrivals module, there are categories such as “Return Home” or “End of Trip” or specifications of different transfer types available, for more explanations, please visit our Glossary.

Under Overnights module, only 1 to 22+ nights are available as categories, because we consider it is necessary for passengers to stay overnights at the destination so that they are likely to need hotel rooms.

Note that if no categories are selected in this filter, it equals to “selecting all”. The same rule applies to the Trip Attributes filters.

Travel Period: Arrival Dates or Overnights Dates

Define the travel period for your analysis, for travellers either arrive or stay overnight in the destination of your interest.

By using ForwardKeys “Basic” parameter panel, users will perform year-on-year analyses by default; therefore, the application will automatically set up the same period during previous year (Y-1) for comparing to the dates [A] for the current period (Y0).

 

You can also click on any of the dates to open a calendar [C], and then select the date range by clicking the start and end dates. It is recommended to click “clear” button [D] before opening the calendar.

Trip Attributes – Trip Origin

There are three most frequent used parameters available in the “Basic” panel under Trip Attributes, while only Trip Origin is essential to set up, in order to launch a query.

Trip Origin is the starting location of the passenger’s air reservation itinerary. It is ultimately an airport terminal, however, depending on your contractual specifications and geographic scale of analysis, trip origin can be displayed as a subcontinent, country, state/province, city, or an airport for your query results.

To understand total international arrivals in your destination(s), please select “Exclude Domestic” [A].

To understand arrivals from specific trip origin(s) to your destination(s), select the origin(s) one by one in the drop-down menu [B], or type their name(s) in the “Quick Search” box [C] and select them as they appear.

Granularity of Trip Origin markets is decided in the below Analysis parameter set. ForwardKeys application can present visuals for max 15 markets in one query. If you have purchased the market but do not see it on the screen, either you can download Excel1 export to get raw data on this market; or, you can select this market in Trip Origin and run another query to see the visuals. Please refer to “Step 4” for how to export raw data.

Analysis (parameters)

There are two essential parameters in the Analysis parameter set in the “Basic” panel view before launching your query: Scale (for time) and Granularity (for geographical categories for Trip Origin).

Scale parameter (A) allows you to define the detail level of the time period of your interest, subject to your contractual specifications.

If you choose to perform your analysis on a monthly scale, the comparable dates will be the exact same calendar period (E.g. “01 to 31-Dec 2017” vs “01 to 31-Dec 2016”).

If you choose to perform a daily or weekly analysis, the comparable dates will define the previous period starting with the same weekday (E.g. “Fri 1 Dec – Thu 28 Dec 2017” vs “Fri 2 Dec – Thu 29 Dec 2016”).

Granularity parameter (B) allows you to define the detail level of the Trip Origin(s) of your interest, subject to your contractual specifications.

If you choose “U.S.A” in Trip Origin, and choose to “Show Trip Origin CITIES”, Top 15 US cities in terms of arrival volume will show up in the query results.

If you choose to “Show Trip Origin as Purchased”, there may be a mix of countries, cities, or airports showing up in the query results, depending on the arrival volume the markets contribute to the destination.

The option of “Show Trip Origin SUBCONTINETS” is available free of charge to analyse total international arrivals for users who have purchased markets at country, city, or airport level.

Now you are ready to run one query in ForwardKeys, click on “Analysis”!

 

Set up parameters in “Standard” and “Advanced” panels

Many more parameters appear if you switch to the “Standard” and “Advanced” panels. Most of them appear as segmentation information in your query results, we just bring them into the parameter panels to offer you more flexibility to customize your analysis focus. If you have doubts and questions on the definitions on any parameter or any parameter category, please visit our Glossary.

The “Standard” and “Advanced” panel brings in the complete Date parameters, which are extremely useful if you want to compare a certain period with NOT previous year, but a few years back, or just a few weeks or months in the future.

Set up Date parameters in “Standard” or “Advanced” parameter panel

Switching to the “Standard” and “Advanced” panels not only enables analyses that are not necessarily year-on-year, but also allows analyses with certain arrival dates and certain booking dates of your interest.

The first row of any date selector is used to set up the period you are interested in, current period (Y0), while the second row [A] is to set up the comparable period (Y-1).

By opening the calendar, you can set up specific dates of interest, such as Chinese New Year, Ramadan, etc., or you can compare the current period with two, three, or more years ago. It is all flexible to set up.

The booking dates selectors [B] allow you to define the time period when the passenger made their reservation. In most cases, we recommend clearing the Booking dates using the X button, so that the application will automatically include all most-update-to-date bookings for your analysis.

The Normalisation dates [C] will automatically be set by default for every query, but can also be defined to receive constant absolute figures. For the definition of Normalisation, please visit our Glossary for “Comparable Set (Normalisation)”.

 

Step 3 – Interpret the results

Results in On the Book, Travel History, or Booking History

The Default view of a query result lands firstly at the key segmentation, Destination, which ForwardKeys users are commonly interested in. The other segmentation information is available by hovering your mouse over the “Segmented by” tab, click in any one that you are interest in.

For each of the segmentations, ForwardKeys displays the below tables and graphs to help your analysis:

• A summary table of absolute figures (A), variations comparing Y0 to Y-1 (B), market shares (C) for the entire Y0 period being analysed;
• A coloured calendar (D) that allows you to adjust the analysed period for data to be displayed in the tables and graphs;
• A findings window (E) to identify ups and downs mechanically;
• A detailed graph displays the absolute figures (F) over the period at the selected time scale of your analysis (daily, weekly, monthly);
• A detailed graph displays the variations (G) over the period at the selected time scale of your analysis (daily, weekly, monthly);
• An event database (H) coordinates with the analysed period.

 

In the detailed graph that displays the absolute figures, there are different lines and one index that can help your analysis.

 

 

 

Use events to interpret results

 

When there are irregular variations that you are unable to understand, try our event calendar for help. Public holidays and school holidays are collected for all countries in the world and ForwardKeys analysts constantly feed the database with more than ten other kinds of events, such as visa eases, terror attacks, natural disasters, etc. Recent analyst inputs within one month will show up under the variation graph. It is possible that these events have impacted on the variations you are seeing.

Click on the event bars to check out more details in a pop-up window. You cannot edit or delete the events added by other users; however, you can add your own comments on the events by clicking the button “add comment”. You can also duplicate and create new events to add any missing ones.

When a user is creating and duplicating/editing events, the following fields with asterisks * are mandatory to be filled:

 

Results in Benchmark

The Benchmark section is where to find a quick summary of the performance of all your purchased locations for queries with either past or future time periods.

Benchmark displays one snapshot of all selected Points of Interests (POIs) in available segmentations, so that you can compare the different performances of POIs in each category of the segmentations.

You can choose different numbers to be displayed in this snapshot by switching the Mode [A] and Values [B] tabs. By default, absolute numbers of Y0 (Absolute) and the variations are displayed.

Options in the Mode tab:

• Absolute #Pax for Arrivals Module, or Absolute #Nights for Overnights module (default display)
• Horizontal shares (comparing shares among POIs for each category), and,
• Vertical shares (comparing among the categories over the same POI).

Options in the Values tab:

• Variations (default display)
• Absolute

You can also reverse the content in the columns and rows by using Transpose XY button [C]. By default, POIs are listed in the rows.

Please note that the Benchmark section only creates traveller profiles for POIs for the general market that is defined in the Trip Origin parameter. Therefore,

If you select only “Exclude Domestic” in the Trip Origin parameter, it creates traveller profiles for POIs based on total international arrivals;

If you select specific markets in the Trip Origin parameter, it creates traveller profiles for POIs solely based on arrivals from your selected markets.