PROCOLOMBIA RELIES ON OAG'S ANALYSER PLATFORM TO DISCOVER NEW MARKETS AND GROW TOURISM

Developing New Routes In a Fragmented Market

With Caribbean beaches, vast coffee plantations, colonial cities, cultural experiences, and  the second most biodiverse country in the world with a varied geography, Colombia has long been on the tourist map. And with tourist visits growing by 50% from 2014 to over 4,2 million people in 2018, Colombia is bringing the challenge to other Latin American tourist hot spots.

As a region, Latin America is quite fragmented with respect to the source markets. There are few major airports in each country, but there many connecting points into them. So whilst there are multiple ways to get there, the majority require connections and stopovers – thus reducing their natural pull.

One of the core focuses for PROCOLOMBIA is to build upon this increased tourist demand, by developing new direct routes into Colombia, expanding existing air routes, and creating new connections with traffic that is flowing into other Latin American Hubs.

Challenge

The challenge for PROCOLOMBIA is understanding where their visiting tourists originate. For example, Madrid is a major gateway to Colombia from Europe. However, a large percentage of those passengers connect from other European locations. So, the challenge is to discover the origin of these passengers, enabling the opportunity to discuss with airlines around creating more direct flights with those countries. Prior to working with OAG, PROCOLOMBIA had difficulty approaching an airline to discuss new route connections, because they didn’t have the data to support their arguments. They had to approach airlines individually in order to get access to their itineraries, and then try to connect the dots.

A new data driven approach in partnership with OAG, is central to PROCOLOMBIA meeting the government’s target of growing incoming tourists by a further 2 million between 2018 and 2022.

Solution

PROCOLOMBIA now knows where to focus their attention, because OAG’s data visualises where their real opportunities for new services and markets are.

Using OAG’s Schedules, Traffic and Connections Analyser Platform, PROCOLOMBIA has been able create business cases to Airlines which leads to new route opportunities.

Traffic Analyser enables them to look at data on indirect passenger routings, or on unserved markets to get a very clear idea of where to focus their attention for markets that are either close to them, or potentially longer haul destinations.

Connections Analyser gives them access to variables which they use in statistical models. These provide insight as to what are the best possible, or most used routes into the country for tourists, enabling them to focus their promotional efforts.

Schedules Analyser enables them to keep an eye on the competing neighboring countries, tracking what services and connections they are growing, in order that they too, may be able to compete for route access or increased capacity. The ability to be able to see the number of airlines that operate directly into neighboring countries, with city and regional connectivity enables them to benchmark themselves against the competition.

In essence it’s the depth and delivery of the OAG data, that enables PROCOLOMBIA to fully understand the dynamics of tourism in the region and increase their understanding of where they need to work with airlines in order to create new profitable routes.

Results

OAG’s data provides deeper insights, and more complex reporting, which ensures decisions are based on factual data, rather than intuition. This has enabled PROCOLOMBIA to become much more proactive in their conversations with potential airline partners, developing new services that will help them to meet growing tourist targets.