Next steps
This first phase of the Scottish Tourism Observatory is just the start of our journey to improve tourism data in Scotland.
The work that’s been done has laid the foundation for future development to meet more of the data needs of tourism stakeholders.
The website and the data pipelines have been designed to be flexible and able to be easily scaled up as the data and other contents grow.
At present, options for continued funding of the Observatory are being explored.
The development of the Observatory so far has confirmed the challenges of the tourism data that is currently available. These challenges have been made worse by the lack of statistics and data collection since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
So, following the creation of the website and data pipelines, the focus of the project is on data development.
This will have two aims -
- One workstream will continue to gather existing data sources to help meet data needs and to build a rich picture of tourism in Scotland – across all its sectors.
- The other workstream will focus on meeting data needs for which it will take more work and budget to find solutions. These include the following: