Forwardkeys, a leader in travel intelligence, partners with Mastercard to provide a comprehensive view of the full traveler journey from travel intention to spend at destination. Together, they provide deepened understanding of tourist behavior along with detailed insights into economic impact, spending patterns and preferences.
ForwardKeys is a leader in travel intelligence, generating and supplying detailed information on global ticketing data, flight searches, travel itineraries, traveller profiles and in-destination behaviour patterns.
By leveraging its extensive travel industry expertise and exceptional proficiency in data analysis, forecasting and insight generation, in combination with comprehensive, sector-specific data from Mastercard SpendingPulse™ Destinations, ForwardKeys is able to generate powerful new insights for destination marketing organisations and tourism boards.
Mastercard SpendingPulse™ Destinations is a macro-level indicator of tourism spend across all payment types. It provides reporting on total and sector-level tourism sales by aggregating anonymized transaction data from the Mastercard payments network as well as combining survey-based estimates for other payment types, including cash. These aggregates are adjusted to account for macroeconomic factors, accurately representing consumer retail spend.
The partnership with Mastercard allows ForwardKeys to offer a new dimension to its data offering. As a result, destination marketing organisations and travel-dependent businesses using ForwardKeys’ data solutions will be able to access key insights into spending patterns and preferences within the destinations in which they operate, deepen their understanding of tourist behaviour and make strategic, data-driven decisions.
This new partnership will empower tourism-dependent businesses using ForwardKeys’ solutions in destinations around the globe to better understand not only the travel patterns that bring visitors to their location and the types of travellers they attract, but how these visitors are spending their time and money within the local economy. This presents a range of opportunities, from informing immediate commercial strategy to longer term planning around the management and sustainability of tourist flows.
The Mastercard SpendingPulse™ Destinations platform currently covers United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Austria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Brazil, Malaysia, Philippines, and Singapore, with many more countries to be launched soon. In the near future, ForwardKeys plans to feed Mastercard aggregated and anonymized travel spend data into its proprietary algorithm — ForwardKeys Total Air Market — combining it with existing sources including airline capacity, ticketing data, geo-data and global flight searches to complement its comprehensive and granular analysis of traveller profiles and behavioural trends.
ForwardKeys co-founder and CEO, Olivier Jager, hailed the benefits of the new partnership for his company’s customers, commenting “The objective of this partnership is to combine ForwardKeys' ability to anticipate travel trends with Mastercard's insights into financial contributions, empowering tourism-dependent businesses to make strategic, data-driven decisions. The end goal is to ensure the destination's strategy remains relevant and sustainable by understanding both traveller behaviour and economic impact.”
