ForwardKeys Enters Partneship with Mastercard

ForwardKeys has entered into a partnership with Mastercard to unlock new traveller spending insights — further enhancing its market-leading Data-as-a-Service offering by incorporating tourism spending data from Mastercard SpendingPulse™ Destinations platform.

By leveraging its extensive travel industry expertise and exceptional proficiency in data analysis, forecasting and insight generation, in combination with comprehensive, sector-specific data from Mastercard SpendingPulse™ Destinations, ForwardKeys is able to generate powerful new insights for destination marketing organisations and tourism boards.

Mastercard SpendingPulse™ Destinations is a macro-level indicator of tourism spend across all payment types. It provides reporting on total and sector-level tourism sales by aggregating anonymized transaction data from the Mastercard payments network as well as combining survey-based estimates for other payment types, including cash. These aggregates are adjusted to account for macroeconomic factors, accurately representing consumer retail spend.

The partnership with Mastercard allows ForwardKeys to offer a new dimension to its data offering. As a result, destination marketing organisations and travel-dependent businesses using ForwardKeys’ data solutions will be able to access key insights into spending patterns and preferences within the destinations in which they operate, deepen their understanding of tourist behaviour and make strategic, data-driven decisions.

This new partnership will empower tourism-dependent businesses using ForwardKeys’ solutions in destinations around the globe to better understand not only the travel patterns that bring visitors to their location and the types of travellers they attract, but how these visitors are spending their time and money within the local economy. This presents a range of opportunities, from informing immediate commercial strategy to longer term planning around the management and sustainability of tourist flows.

The Mastercard SpendingPulse™ Destinations platform currently covers United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Austria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Brazil, Malaysia, Philippines, and Singapore, with many more countries to be launched soon. In the near future, ForwardKeys plans to feed Mastercard aggregated and anonymized travel spend data into its proprietary algorithm — ForwardKeys Total Air Market — combining it with existing sources including airline capacity, ticketing data, geo-data and global flight searches to complement its comprehensive and granular analysis of traveller profiles and behavioural trends.

ForwardKeys co-founder and CEO, Olivier Jager, hailed the benefits of the new partnership for his company’s customers, commenting “Having on-demand access to accurate, granular and comprehensive global travel data is key to our customers’ business models — and fundamental to their success. We’re delighted that through our cooperation with Mastercard we’re able offer vital new insights regarding consumer spending. It’s a critical time for tourism-dependent businesses, as they emerge from post-COVID-19 recovery and plan for future sustainable growth — and this new data will prove extremely valuable strategically. Moreover, bundled synergies and ForwardKeys’ unique capabilities using forecast algorithms will enable the travel industry to benefit from very precise future traveller expenditure data by destination.”