Hong Kong should totally like, step up its game when it comes to collecting, sharing, and using visitor data, according to some lawmakers. They were chatting about a motion to boost the city’s rep as a top spot for international tourism and a super cool destination. Tourism dude Perry Yiu Pak-leung brought up the motion on Thursday, urging the authorities to get more detailed data because right now the industry is all like that story about blind folks and an elephant.
Yiu was talking about that tale where a bunch of blind peeps touch different parts of an elephant and describe it based only on their limited feels, leading to a bunch of confused and incomplete understandings. “The government is only putting out basic data from the Immigration Department and Tourism Board surveys,” he said, pointing out that there’s a ton of missing info, especially when it comes to Hong Kong residents’ travel habits. “We don’t know stuff like tourist gender, age, how they come and go, their travel patterns, where mainland Chinese tourists are from, and what kinds of visas they have,” he added.
Like, seriously, not really sure why this matters, but I guess it’s important to know who’s coming to visit, right? Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like it would be helpful to have all that data to make decisions about how to make Hong Kong an even more awesome place for tourists. So, yeah, let’s get on that data collection train, folks! Who knows what cool insights we might find out along the way.
