City Break Shopping Barometer for ECM destinations

 

The members of the Research & Statistics Group recently initiated a project aimed at collecting the prices of tourism-related services across European Cities. All ECM members are encouraged to participate in the project, which will allow us to conduct a benchmarking analysis based upon the price level of those services most commonly purchased by tourists during their city trips. The shopping bundle covers service categories such as accommodation, food and beverage, entertainment and local transport (see table 1). Some shopping items are monitored in different quality categories in order to reflect the consumption of different types of city visitor (e.g. business travellers, weekend city breakers or backpackers). The price of a lunch, for instance, can be monitored as a 3-course restaurant meal or a fast-food menu. The cost of transport to the destination and intermediation services is deliberately not included in the bundle, since the monitoring of these prices goes beyond the scope of this study. ECM members can submit suggestions to expand the list to the Research and Statistics Working Group (e-mail to: valeria.croce@modul.ac.at).

 

At this stage, the study methodology aims to minimize the time cost of the data collection process, while offering a comprehensive picture of services’ price level across cities. An exact specification for each service has been developed by the researchers of ECM Research & Statistics Group, as a requirement for data comparison, and to simplify data collection. Taking museums for instance, researchers should investigate the “Regular price for the entrance to the biggest/main museum (permanent collection), for 1 adult, no reductions”. Prices are to be collected only once a year. Ideally, the service providers (e.g. the hotel chain, taxi company, museum), from which prices are collected, should also remain the same over time, in order to speed up the process and to monitor price changes over time. Once the correct service provider has been identified, prices can be easily collected each time either directly (e.g. by telephone) or from their website (e.g. the public transport authority official website).

 

Two different methodologies of data collection have been developed: one for the hotel industry and one for all other shopping items. This specification takes into account the higher differentiation and volatility of prices in the hotel industry in comparison with other businesses. Hotel rates, for instance, can be collected from 4-star and 2/3-star hotels. In order to account for hotel rates’ fluctuations over a year, the lowest and the highest rate can be provided, which reflect the peak and off-peak seasons in destinations(1). Similarly, different rates can be specified for those establishments applying different prices for weekdays and weekends, and for different uses of the same room (as a single or double room). Up to eight different rates can be collected for each hotel in each category, to piece together the puzzle of hotel prices in a destination. Data collection for all other items is much more straightforward, since only one price per year is collected for each item.

 

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 Table 1 – List of Shopping Items

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Once the prices for all the items have been collected, data can be input into TourMIS (2), the online Marketing-Information-System commonly used by ECM members to share tourism statistics and benchmark a destination’s performance. With the aim of supporting ECM members with the task of data collection and analysis, a new section has been created by Prof. Karl Wöber, within the system. TourMIS provides a user-friendly interface to input prices in the database together with other useful information, such as the currency, the time of data collection and slight deviations from the standard definitions. If, for instance, there is no zoo in a destination, the researcher can provide the price for the entrance to a similar attraction, such as the Tropicario. Exceptions to the official definitions must be specified in the “note” string available next to the item, to make the slight difference in definition transparent. Notes will be displayed with the prices; all researchers should carefully avoid making any reference to the names of hotels or other service providers.

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Figure 1 – The link to the ECM City Break Shopping Barometer Data Entry in TourMIS.

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This section can be accessed from the www.tourmis.info web site after logging in (3). By clicking on the “Nights & arrivals” link in the “City tourism in Europe” menu and selecting the “Data Entry” link in the top right-hand corner, it is possible to access the link to the ECM City Break Shopping Barometer data entry section. This link gives users access to an initial screen where the name of the destination(for which the inputter has data input rights) is displayed.

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The main aim of the project is to shed light on the costs differential existing across cities in Europe, collecting publicly available data for a specific set of items among those commonly consumed by visitors. Ranking destinations according to their costliness is not the final goal of the project: the focus here is to gain a deeper insight into the price differentials of services commonly used by tourists across city tourism destinations in Europe. Transparency is therefore a fundamental feature of this initiative: full compliance with the methodology and the provision of real prices is a basic requirement for the comparison of results.

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(2) The major aim of TourMIS is to provide information and decision support for tourism managers and scholars. TourMIS provides on-line tourism survey data, as well as various tools to transform data into precious management information.

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