You work for a tourism board at a top destination within the United States that, among other tasks, sends information out to potential visitors, provides advertising for the destination, sells tickets to local events and parks, and helps drive economic growth by attracting visitors to the region. The market research team for your organization has decided to gather more insight into how their ticket sales impact the local economy and have asked for your assistance.

 The IT team has gathered data from attractions' ticket sales to show what tickets have been purchased and when, and each attraction website has also provided reports of sales on different products. The marketing team also has data regarding who has requested information packets to be mailed to them about the local area and then came to visit. Partnerships with several national travel agencies and popular travel booking websites have also provided some great information on shopping patterns, time of year for bookings, and much more.

 The teams agree that a new data warehouse might be an option for bringing the information together. Still, the CEO is historically reluctant to spend money on something other than promoting the destination for fear it won't generate value. Despite this, they are big fans of graphs, factual data, and other bits of information about the destination.

 Your boss has asked you to help contribute to the argument in favor of a data warehouse. As this will be discussed at an executive level, you feel a presentation is the best approach to get the message across.

QUESTIONS

• Discuss a data warehouse and the benefits for the tourism board.
• What is a dashboard, and what kind of information could it help that we don't already have in separate databases?