If you want go from gut feel to insight inspired, this is the Data Diaries with your hosts from Dexibit, Pierre Perez and Angie Judge. The best podcast for visitor attraction leaders passionate about data and AI. This episode is brought to you by Dexibit. We provide data analytics and AI software specifically for visitor attractions so you can reduce total time to insight and total cost of ownership while democratizing data and improving your team’s agility. Here comes the show!

Angie: Pierre. What is happening to the world? Tariffs, tourism, takeovers. It’s been a real mixed bag the past year for visitor attractions when it comes to visitation and growth. It’s a jungle out there.

Pierre: Absolutely. Global data has been all over the show, especially since 2024, right? We’ve seen a huge change in behavior in 2024 and. Seems to be the same for 2025 so far. We’ll dive a little bit into that later on because we have some really cool benchmark data to look at. It has been a very different year so far.

Angie: To put this into context, if we wind the clock back to 2024, globally, visitation only grew the whole year, year on year, from 2023 to ’24, only by 5%. That was down from 30% the year prior. It was actually lower in the Northern hemisphere down to 3%, which was dropping from 16% the year prior. So 2024 already was kind of flat. I mean, we don’t expect the industry to grow at 30% year in year. Right? Like that was a, that was still a bit of pandemic recovery. We are talking about ’22 to ’23 at that point. So ’23 to ’24 was never gonna be pulling double digit numbers, but 5% felt [00:02:00] a bit flat and a lot of that growth was banked up into Q1. We saw some good results. Everything was off to an amazing start. January, February, March, by April, we had a real dip and then had a soft summer in the northern hemisphere and the second half of the year just really struggled to get off the ground.

Pierre: Yeah, absolutely. There was this saying everywhere on social media survive until 2025 – 2024 was looking a little bit green. But, you know, bear in mind, 2023 in a lot of regions, people were recording their best year ever. Right. We, I was, I remember being in, in Europe in 2023, we had an amazing summer and visit attractions were performing extremely well. It didn’t sort of carry through 2024. 2024 in my opinion, was the first normal year after the pandemic, right? This is where like everything is back to normal. Now, let’s have a look at how we perform in 2024.
This is what people that we work with are doing what worked, what didn’t work? Can we use levers to amplify what work in 2024 in 2025? And this is what most of the conversations are right now with people that we work with.

Angie: And there was a couple of reasons for some of the stuff in 24. I remember April, we had some changes around holidays, number of weekends. Tell me more about that.

Pierre: Yeah, it’s always a good one to, to look at. We usually, we sometimes are guilty also to look at data very zoomed in, which is usually done a month, granularity, right? And we looking at, we look at our numbers for the month and we say, Hey, look, we overperform against last year, we underperform against last year, et cetera, on a monthly basis.

What we do need to do on top of that is zoom out a little bit and understand how the specific month of each year is shaped against the same month last year. You’ve mentioned an extra weekend, or, one day of weekend last this year against last year can have a huge impact in your numbers, right?

So zooming out to understand that. If we talk us, we have, you know, holidays such as spring break that I’m never usually, on the same month or same time of the month each year. So that can also play a huge fact into the deltas that we are seeing when we are analyzing year on year performance and a monthly granularity.

Angie: Yeah, and I remember, Easter has shifted around. It was at the tail end of March last year, which gave us this really great booster March in 2024 where everybody thought the year was going exceptionally well. But then of course April down on the year prior, because that’s where Easter had fallen previously this year.

We’ve got Easter back in April again, and spring break. Let’s have a look at the numbers for 2025, we’ve got January down 2%, February down 10%, March down 11%, or actually for North America, just down 9%. So we’ve seen the flip of the coin here. If we flip back to 2024, we had, north America behind at 3% versus 5% for year on year growth across the year. So this year so far, we’ve got North America. Although negative figures like everyone else, they are actually ahead of the pack, down just 9% versus 11% for everyone else in March. But this year we’ve had a few weird things to contend with, right? It’s been a year of global events.

Pierre: It has been a year of global events and external factors like that do play a role in visitation figures. Right. Are we talking about domestic tourism, international tourism, et cetera. So there’s been a lot of different events that have been impacting visitation, this year so far.

Angie: Yeah, we’ve had, in the first few months of the year, we had one of the biggest cold snaps in recent history in the east coast of the US. Multiple snow day closures for a lot of locations and in LA of course, sadly, the LA fires, which closed many venues and continues on to have some impacts. Even now we’re recording this in what, May 25 we’re seeing still some impacts to tourism in la. We had, of course inauguration in dc and state funeral, which, impacted closures for those days and also has impacted, visitation somewhat, positively and negatively in some [00:07:00] spaces. Sadly plane crashes in DC and Philly. Having an impact on visitation, so quite unusual things coming out this year that have maybe had a say on those results.

Pierre: It is all linked together. Absolutely. And it’s hard to, identify exactly what may be causing, visitation fluctuation, but as you mentioned, it is absolutely a combination of events that has impacted visitation so far.

Angie: So this data is coming from Dexibit’s customers. We love working with this data. This is a very unique industry benchmark. First of all, it’s daily and granularity. Secondly, it’s real time in monitoring how the industry is going. That’s what makes it so unique. The only other data that we can refer back to is publicly available, published data from publicly traded commercial companies, from publicly published nonprofits who are putting their annual visitation so forth out there. So it’s really unique to be able to have this aggregate look at how the industry is performing. But if we, so we otherwise have to wait for what? 15, 18 months to get some results out for rest of industry, so the last data we have is actually all the way back to 2023 from the rest of the sector, where their public reports have been put out. And the year on year growth that the rest of the industry reported in 2023 was only 6%.

Keeping in mind that Dexibit’s customers in 2023 recorded growth rates on average of 30% in that year. So if they’re sitting at 6% versus 30 in ’23. We saw 5% from our customers on average last year, and this year we’re seeing negative. We can actually expect that the rest of the industry is somewhat behind those figures. Again, any guesses on why our customers outperform rest of industry when it comes to visitation growth?

Pierre: Yes. Are there educated guesses? Maybe less so. There’s a few theories out there. One is, customers are working with us for a reason, that they pay close attention to their data and they want to democratize the data across different departments, right? That means all the way down to the curator or your exhibitions to understand what is attracting visitors to your museum, to your zoos, to their aquarium, et cetera, et cetera. They’re also really conscious about pricing. If they do charge for, admission, which is another topic that we benchmark on for another episode, but they pay very close attention to how they’re performing and also how other people are performing. This helps them to make better decisions.

Angie: What do you think people are happy with as a growth rate?

Pierre: It’s a tough question. It’s how long is a piece of string really? Right? It depends on the department, I’m talking, you know, membership, retail, visitor experience and all of that. So when we talk about growth, and here for this specific context, we are only talking about visitation growth, right?

There’s also a caveat here in term of the type of attraction we’re talking about established versus fairly new, so the expectations will be different. Based on, how long this attraction has been running, right now in established attraction, I’d say, a yearly growth rates are of between five to 10% is sort of expected.

And I’m curious to see if you, if you concur or if you, have different conversation with people that you talk to. When you talk to, a new venue, these numbers are always in the double digits, right? Year on year.

Angie: Yeah, I think if you’ve done a, a really significant redevelopment or a blockbuster exhibition, you’d be expecting a minimum of 10, 30% plus on your growth rate. But if we are talking about, a new build, it’s different again, given that they don’t have a baseline to come from. Actually, typically we see the reverse in a new build, typically their first year is their best year. Second year is slightly behind. Third year, they tend to see a drop. As, you know, everybody who’s going to visit would’ve visited once. And then it’s about attracting, repeat and tourist, and new audiences. If we’re talking about an established attraction, I would agree with you. With a caveat that I think five to 10% is great. I think in terms of sustainable annual growth for an established attraction, people should be happy with around that two to 6% mark, would be my pick. So actually when we look at last year as result, although it was really bumpy through the year, which makes it a hard year. Actually the overall figure of 5% is not too bad if we’re sort of putting that in the context of that, that two to 6%, if [00:12:00] we were to look at it this through a business lens, your average sort of, small, mid-sized business is usually happy with something north of 10%, established companies like to sit five to 15% Nonprofits in that five to 15% mark as well. So yeah, I totally agree with you. Depends on the museum or the visitor attractions’ age, depends on what department and metric we’re talking about. Yeah, I would shoot for, if you’re going outside the two to 6% range, have a good reason why.
Pierre: I’m gonna have a question for you as well. Our mission is to democratize data in visitor attractions, right? We want to break down silos. Do you think the democratization of a visit to attraction in term of. You know, we’ve, we’ve had firsthand experience of people with no experience in visitor attraction before are building visitor attractions right now, right? Such as, family, entertainment places, one of the aspects that I’m curious to see, have we seen a growth in the number of venues that are out there? Because that will explain why also the visitation growth is not as big as what it was in the previous year, if you have more places to choose from to spend your time, the likelihood of guests returning to the same places is lower

Angie: Possibly. There’s definitely a lot of competitive activity, vying for a visitor’s attention, particularly in certain cities, like New York and, and so forth. LA. London, Singapore. But, I think that some of that competitive tension also comes from outside the industry, and in particular with our cell phones, you know, with the Tiktoks and the Netflixes of the world as well.

You know, when the family decides what to do on a Saturday morning, like peeling the kids away from a screen is half the battle. And then we get into the, and what do we do, once we leave the house. So I think that definitely,, yeah, that com competition is something to think about on all fronts. For sure. What do you reckon is easier to grow, visitation, attendance, revenue, or membership?

Pierre: That’s a very good question. I feel like revenue would be one of the easiest to grow, because you can simply put your prices up to a degree, without upsetting anyone dramatically. There’s a few levels that you can pull that are low hanging fruits, in my opinion, that will increase revenue.

On the visitation side, logistically and strategically, it’s a lot more complicated to lift, right? You’re talking organizing exhibition, which is not, you know, it’s not a two weeks project, right? It’s, it takes an enormous amount of time , and resources to organize. And that’s what you’re gonna need to increase visitation.
It’s gonna take special events, it’s gonna take festivals, it’s gonna take something new. Really drive people, were talking about social media earlier. Social media has new content very frequently, and this is I guess why people engage with it so much. It’s the same thing here, that if you want to drive visitation substantially, you need to have that fresh content in front of people to prompt them to come to you.

Angie: Yeah, absolutely. I would agree with that. I think it’s harder to get another person in the door than it is to get somebody who’s already there to spend more, do more. Even it’s harder to get a new member than it is to get an existing member to come back that one more time, or do a bit more the next time that they come.

When we look at the cost of servicing a visit, the visitor acquisition costs, the marketing dollars we have to spend to get that person to come to the attraction in the first place is one of the higher parts of the cost versus, servicing that visit once they are there. So yeah, I would definitely agree with you. I think if you wanna improve performance in these slim years going for improving your per cap with onsite spend, with ticket price, with auxiliary spend, that’s where the easier wins are. We’ve seen that in the publicly listed companies too.

Right? Visitation was flat or down , but revenue was up. They were getting more out of their visits, which is cool to see. Still a squeeze on the profit margins with rising cost, but great to see the growth.

Pierre: That was my next point, is that an increase in revenue doesn’t mean an increase in your margins or your profit. As we’ve seen, again, we talked about external events that are impacting visitation. The same goes on here with external event impacting potential cost of goods at retail stores, but also on the F and B sector.

Like things have been more expensive to buy for cafes and restaurants on sites, which means they need to offset that cost to the customers, which means yes, your revenue is growing, but it’s growing as a result of your cost increasing, not necessarily people spending extra. And I think that’s a different, topic for another episode. But this is also what I like to see is that if your revenue increases, what is it caused by? Is it because the average transaction has gone up? Is it because the basket size has gone up? And then you look at your margin and so on.

So, yes, revenue is easier to, grow than visitation, but you can also do certain activities to increase visitation, for you. Yeah.

Angie: Yeah. That’s gonna be the big question on everybody’s lips this year is the impact of tariffs, especially in the retail store. Like you say in food and beverage, even in those new locations who are trying to get their construction projects finished and have got equipment and facilities and things sitting at the border.

And looking at those publicly listed visitor attractions too, they haven’t, a lot of them haven’t yet published their full results for the year, last year. But what they are sort of all setting shareholder expectation around the theme of demand moderation in 2025. If we look back at their quarterlies that they were releasing, pretty much Six Flags was the only anomaly, reporting what looked to be about 3% growth with their merger, that they had. But everybody else, again, quite quite soft.
I wanna turn now and talk a little bit about tourism. We had US international tourism sitting at about 31% growth from in 2023 it was sitting at 66 million. Moved up to 72 million in ’24, not quite at pre pandemic levels of 79, although is projected to, to hit a record break in next year with America’s two 50 anniversary. But I know Oxford Tourism Economics came out and projected an adjustment down to as low as minus 9%, which everybody was scoffing at, but they’re indicating that the March actuals have come in just a touch under 12%, which, if they’re right, 12% negative growth, if they’re right, is a huge impact. If we look at some of the big visitor origin for US, international tourism, Canada, Mexico, China, Canadian entries were down 32% in March, according to Canada. Air Canada has actually got to the point of producing its flight volume and at one point Trudeau was telling his citizens to travel at home. This is really gonna be one of the big stories to follow for visitation in 2025 is international tourism.
Pierre: Absolutely. You know, despite that, despite the Canada entries being down, what we’ve seen is that domestic tourism in the US was actually really healthy. Especially in Washington DC where we saw a few museums really benefited from that local or hyper-local crowd coming and supporting them, and going to these venues, so that, that domestic tourism was looking pretty good.

Angie: Yeah, it’s interesting, Bank of America put out some figures of domestic tourism. So not looking at like local, hyper-local travel, but more, further afield, domestic tourism numbers in the US were sitting at 5% growth, 2023; 8% growth. 2024. Bank of America are saying credit card spending, electronic spending, down 2.5% in March, for lodging accommodation, and down 6% for air. So I think, whilst we’re seeing that sort of boom, especially in areas like DC on the locals and the hyper locals, perhaps those coming from further afield, like maybe people are less, less likely to fly, more likely to drive great for drive cities like, the DC Metro area, New York, la et cetera.

Maybe going to hurt a little bit. More for cities that people have to fly in, to visit.

Pierre: And that’s interesting to, to see, right? I guess you will expect locals not needing. Lodging or air travel as you mentioned. So let’s keep an eye on these numbers. We are, usually, at a zip code level when we, look at origin of the guest, and what we’ve seen is that the zip codes immediately surrounding venues, have been performing pretty well, in DC.

Angie: Yeah. And if we zoom out a little bit more in the world, I’m really curious to see how this tourism situation’s gonna play out for other countries. I mean, maybe one country’s loss. It will be another one’s gain. I don’t know how that’s gonna play out for our Canadian venues. For their domestic tourists or some of our other, you know, whether Europe might benefit a little bit from those that might be diverting travel from elsewhere. I know regionally like countries like Saudi, Qatar in the Middle East, leading on tourism growth because they’re coming from you know, a pretty low starting point. And same with some of Central America, and some of the cheaper just destinations in Europe performing really well. So I’d be curious to see how all of that plays out in our big cities around the world.
Pierre: Absolutely. I’ve been hearing some amazing numbers from Japan as well recently with a huge amount of international tourists, flocking to Japan right now to take advantage of the currency and the yen being so low. So there will be, I think, some really interesting numbers coming from Japan for ’24, ’25.
Angie: What’s your pick for what America two fifty is gonna do next year?

Pierre: I think, it’d be a great thing, right? Isn’t it? The FIFA World Cup as well. Then we had the LA Olympics in 2028 on the back of that as well, two years after that. So, I think it’s gonna be a, an impressive year. I mean, I know there’s a lot of these infrastructures and a lot of planning around that.

So I think it’s gonna be a huge year ahead.

Angie: Yeah, definitely for, East Coast. I think, DC is an obvious pick. Philly probably, I know Philly are also hosting some fifa, New York, new York’s planning some really cool events, I think, some of the sailboat, regattas and things like that for two 50. But yeah, I’m curious about what it will do in other spots.

Like in LA or San Francisco where there we’ll see quite the same impact on visitation for visitor attractions. It might be quite dependent on what their public programming is and how it sort of ties in with what city officials are doing and things like that. It’s really interesting to see how that plays out.

Pierre: I think so, and also interesting. We should be seeing some of these numbers very early on. Something that we’ve noticed in 2024 and 2025, but the shift. Of how far in advance people were booking to come to the venue or even the channel that they were using before they were coming to an attraction.

We used to see right after COVID a lot of people booking online and, planning their trip a little bit. Further ahead on what we are right now. We’re seeing a lot of onsite tickets being sold right now and all people being a lot more impromptu with their visits. So I’d be interesting to know what these big events due to that book in lead time that we usually look at. And I assume these numbers will be, started to be impacted, towards the second half of this year.

Angie: Hopefully we see booking lead time picking up a bit ’cause it’s been falling the last few years since the height of COVID. Definitely helps our attractions when they have a little bit more predictability and who they know is going to come.

So if you’re in Dexibit, pull out your benchmark search benchmarks in your library. You’ve got some great data sets in there for visitation growth, and much, much more. I always find, I don’t know about you Pierre, but I love walking through benchmarks with visitor attractions because you get that reaction of. It’s not just us. That sort of validation, of is it me or is it something else? Is it the world? I think that can be really good in both scenarios. Like when things aren’t going quite so well, it can be really comforting to have that sort of check. To be like, oh, this is actually a common experience. But also when things are going really well, it is also that nice check to know, to pat yourself on the back and give the team a high five, and recognize when things are above performance. Benchmarks are a great point to put into context how things are going for you and your team.

Pierre: And talking about benchmarks. I love that we talk about visitation. In another episode we can maybe talk about pricing, but also how are people feeling when they come to these attractions, right? Has the sentiment and the emotions that people are feeling when they come to attractions have changed over the year?
The expectations change, and the value, what do they feel about the value when they go to these places? So I’m really excited to dive into that.

Angie: My favorite topic, we can see what the complaint levels for restrooms are across different visitor attractions globally. Just in case you needed to know.
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