“How can data help us increase wine and food tourism?”

That’s the question I’ve been asked to address in a month’s time, during the keynote address at the Business of Wine and Food Tourism conference in Cape Town, South Africa.  

My first (admittedly selfish) reaction: Cape Town! Cape Town!

[ahem]

My second (significantly more rational) reaction: That’s actually three questions rolled into one.

1. How can data about wine help?

2. How can data about food help?

3. How can data about tourism help?

What I especially love about the “three in one” factor is that it reflects the true definition of a big data company: to aggregate multiple sources of data across multiple platforms.

In other words, pulling together data about wine + food + tourism is what our team of analysts is specifically skilled at doing.

So yes, we’ve got sources about wine consumers that we can pull from, that they’re already used to dealing with. The data has to do with behavior, and location, and sentiment, and frequency.

And yes, thanks to new friends and local partners, we’ve got additional data about things like hotel/occupancy figures, air arrivals and social media reach.

Which is all good, and really exciting.

But we know there’s more, particularly when we think about the second part of the request for the keynote content: What can South Africa learn from California, particularly as it relates to the tourism industry recovering from a natural disaster?

In California, it was last year’s wildfires and the drought before that. In South Africa, it’s their drought also and reports of a water shortage that has crippled tourism efforts and reservations.

Plenty of similarities, and lots of lessons to be learned.

Here’s my question for you, and our request for your help:

What sources of data do you know, who could contribute to our analysis? Where, in California or elsewhere, can we turn for quantifiable “lessons learned” that are helpful and worth sharing?

We’re open to suggestions, and I’d love to feature the knowledge of these sources in my talk.

Here’s my cell phone number and email: +1.702.528.3717 and cathy@enolytics.com, and I’ll actually be in Sonoma this weekend, all the way until Tuesday, in case you’re local and would like to meet up in person to talk.

Thank you in advance for your help.