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

Departures Module Get Started

You can start using ForwardKeys by following a few easy steps:

• Step 1 – Decide your analysis needs
• Step 2 – Set up parameters and run a query
  • Set up parameters in “Basic” panel
  • Set up parameters in “Standard” and “Advanced” panels
• Step 3 – Interpret the Results
  • Results in On the Book, Travel History, or Booking History
  • Results in Benchmark

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

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.

 

Point of Interest (POI)

Your source markets 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.

Travel Period: Departure Dates

Define the travel period for your analysis, for travellers depart to the destination(s) 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).

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

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.

Destination set of parameters

There are six most frequent used parameters available in the “Basic” panel under Destination, while only three of them are essential to set up, in order to launch a query: Destination, Length of Stay at Destination, and Geographic granularity for destination locations.

Destinations

Departures module users quite often want to understand the departure trends to any destination, therefore selecting “Exclude Domestic” [A] is the most often used setting for Destination filter.

You can also select the specific destination(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.

Lengths of stay at Destination

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

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

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

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.

Granularity of destination locations

Granularity of destination locations can be decided using this parameter and ForwardKeys application can present visuals for max 15 locations in one query. If you do not see any smaller destination(s) on the screen, either you can download Excel1 export to get raw data on this location; or, you can select this location in Destination and run another query to see the visuals. Please refer to “Step 4” for how to export raw data.

Trip Attributes

There are two most frequent used parameters available in the “Basic” panel under Trip Attributes, but neither of them must be set up.

Analysis (parameters) – Scale

Scale (for time) needs to be decided the Analysis parameter set in the “Basic” panel view before launching your query.

Scale parameter 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”).

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

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 Normalization 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)”.

The Default view of a query result lands firstly at the key segmentation, Trip Origin, 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.

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.

 

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.

 

If you have any doubts and questions,
please do not hesitate to contact the Customer Support team by submitting a ticket at:
https://support.forwardkeys.com