As part of its collaboration with Mastercard, the Polish Tourism Organisation (POT) has been given access to the Tourism Insights platform, which will help the POT to plan activities aimed at drawing international tourists back to Poland.

Tourism Insights is a tool enabling a comprehensive review of international tourists’ trips to Poland, starting from planning, through the time actually spent here, all the way to sharing comments on social media afterwards. It will help the Polish Tourism Organisation to plan activities aimed at drawing international visitors back to Poland. Consequently, the Polish tourism industry, which Polish Economic Institute and Statistics Poland data show to generate PLN 85 billion of GDP annually, will gain a chance of achieving rapid growth and dynamic development in the new conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Tourism Insights platform aggregates data from search engines, applications and platforms used for booking accommodation and flights. This information is supplemented with tourists’ opinions on places and attractions, posted on social media. To complete the picture, Mastercard provides its own data on how much tourists deciding on a holiday in Poland spend here, and on what.

In the current situation, knowledge based on hard data gives the POT a competitive edge in the drive to bring tourists to Poland. For example, access to advanced analytics will enable the POT to gain a better understanding of the profile of visitors from selected markets who visit Poland, examining aspects such as their spending patterns, preferences and needs. This knowledge will facilitate the design of precisely targeted promotional activities serving to draw tourists back to Poland. Their opinions and impressions expressed on social media will show the POT which destinations and attractions should be communicated more strongly in different parts of the world because of the positive response they generate. Moreover, the knowledge given by the data will also be useful for local activities aimed at improving Poland’s image among visitors to our country.

“We are providing the Polish Tourism Organisation with a tool which, thanks to data analytics, will offer a better insight into trends related to tourists visiting Poland, in terms of their spending, preferences and satisfaction level”, says Krzysztof Sobala, Vice President Mastercard Data & Services at the Polish division of Mastercard Europe. “Access to these resources will enable the information from the data to be translated into actual plans and actions aimed at promoting Poland or selected cities, which – hopefully – will result in a growing number of visitors. We are confident this will help alleviate the pandemic’s consequences for the tourism sector and, in the longer term, get it back on the path of growth”, he adds.

“Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Polish Tourism Organisation is continually adjusting its strategies for international markets to the current situation”, says Rafał Szlachta, President of the Polish Tourism Organisation. “It is our task to draw as many tourists as possible to our country. However, this needs to be done in such a way as to distribute tourist traffic across the whole of Poland. We will certainly use the Tourism Insights platform for this; we will be prepared for implementing activities and campaigns on individual markets as soon as the epidemiological situation allows”, he explains.

Consumers as well as Mastercard’s business partners can rest assured that the company analyses spending trends according to the highest security and privacy protection standards. These lie at the foundation of Mastercard’s business model and are an inherent element of all of the company’s products and services. Thanks to innovative data aggregation and anonymisation mechanisms, information about specific transactions remains invisible and is never analysed or distributed.