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A World Bank-Visa collaboration analyzes credit card spending to collect better data for sustainable tourism development
The tourism sector is a major driver of economic growth and inclusive job creation. Tourism generates a high number of jobs, especially for women (UN Tourism). In 2024, tourism was responsible for one in ten jobs worldwide, delivering 337.7 million total jobs, and accounted for 10.5 percent of global GDP . For many developing countries, it is a primary generator of foreign exchange.
The growth of this vital sector depends heavily on public investment in infrastructure and services. But rapid change, due to uncertain geopolitics, climate shocks, and shifting consumer behavior, can make it hard to know how best to spend scarce resources. Traditional data sources are unable to keep up, leaving policymakers without the timely insights needed to effectively manage mounting complexities. Only a few developing coutries collect and maintain tourism satellite accounts (TSAs), which help capture tourism’s contribution to their economies. However, even in these countries, tourist arrival data and spending behavior, through immigration data and visitor surveys, are often processed with a lag. There is an urgent need for more accessible, more granular, and more timely data tools.
Emerging Data Tools
For this reason, the World Bank partnered with Visa to access anonymized and aggregated credit card spend data in the Caribbean and attempt to fill data gaps. This and other emerging tools for policymaking—such as satellite and geospatial mapping, analysis of online reviews, artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics—now allow tourism destinations to take a closer look at local demand patterns, gauge visitor satisfaction in near-real time, and measure progress on everything from carbon footprints to women’s employment in tourism.
The information these tools provide can help develop marketing strategies to target high-spending travelers, improve resource allocation towards products which generate the most revenue, monitor shifts in demand and spend categories during crises, smooth out seasonality and guide investments in public and private tourism facilities and infrastructure.
Bridging the Caribbean Data Divide
Developing Caribbean countries, like most developing economies, face gaps in tourism data, given their often underdeveloped and underfunded systems to collect it. This is not ideal, given that tourism is the lifeblood of the region. In 2023, the Caribbean welcomed approximately 28 million visitors who spent US$40 billion (UN Tourism). More importantly, tourism supported approximately 2.75 million jobs and accounted for 11.4 percent of GDP (WTTC). But for the region to be able to fully leverage the tourism sector, it must have access to timely and granular data that can help inform its policies.
A recent World Bank study on the Rethinking Caribbean Tourism: Strategies for a more Sustainable Future illustrates how tourism data shortages risk becoming a roadblock to the sector’s sustainable development. Researchers for this study not only had to reconcile differences in how each of the Caribbean countries tracked tourism indicators, but they also needed to drill down on the numbers and distinguish between specific segments like cruise or adventure tourism, something not possible with traditional statistics.
Digital Payments Data: A Game Changer
Payments data reflects actual behavior instead of estimations or intentions, and can help fill the gaps that traditional data cannot. It is timely and multifaceted, allowing for a detailed analysis of who spends how much on what. Its standardized nature also helps compare findings across markets and destinations. The World Bank-Visa collaboration was able to use payment data to uncover patterns that are not visible through traditional data.
In Jamaica, for example, the study found that travelers from different places have different local spending preferences, an important finding to help adapt product characteristics and promotion (figure 1). For instance, data on visitors from Germany showed higher spending transactions related to Hotels and Lodging and Restaurants and Dining, while U.S. visitors spend more than others on Transportation and Travel Services. In Saint Lucia, the data signaled untapped potential for spending outside of traditional hotel zones, leading to recommendations for strategies to strengthen linkages with local restaurants and artisans.
Visa data also helped reveal spending patterns within specialized niches, like cruise tourism. In Antigua and Barbuda, retail purchases from cruise travelers were concentrated in jewelry stores (figure 2)—an insight with the potential to jumpstart conversations about how broader retail offerings could capture extra visitor spending, or the potential to invest in growing the locally-produced jewelry value chain.
A New Travel Data Paradigm
As visitor digital footprints grow, and as more powerful aggregation and analytical tools are developed, there is increasing potential to combine datasets and approaches to provide fast, customized, and granular policy advice better suited for an uncertain and changing world. The World Bank’s Global Tourism Team regularly produces research, toolkits, and reports utilizing innovative datasets to inform targeted policies and strategies that further tourism for development. This includes the Tourism Watch quarterly publication, which provides up-to-date data from an array of sources along with analysis of recent tourism developments and policy considerations.
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