How Do Your Tourism Businesses Actually Look Online?

The Problem With Most Tourism Assessments

Governments and development agencies commission digital assessments all the time. A consultant audits the sector, writes a report, makes recommendations. The report goes to the minister's office. Sometimes it influences a budget line. Often it doesn't.

Meanwhile, the businesses the assessment was actually about — the tour operators, the craft sellers, the festival organisers — never see the data. They don't know how they scored. They don't know what the gaps are. They carry on as before.

We designed this one differently.

Working with the International Trade Centre (ITC) and the EU-funded Youth Empowerment Project (YEP) in The Gambia, we built an assessment that served two audiences at once: the government agencies that needed a national evidence base to guide investment, and the 84 creative industry businesses and tour operators who needed to understand their own digital situation well enough to actually do something about it.

What We Assessed

The scope covered 61 creative industry stakeholders across seven sectors — audiovisual, crafts, cultural heritage, fashion & design, festivals, performing arts, and marketing/publishing — plus 23 tour operators.

Each was evaluated across five dimensions:

Platform presence — which channels they were on and whether accounts were genuinely active
Website quality — functionality, mobile performance, load speed, and technical health
Discoverability — whether their digital presence could actually be found by the international visitors they needed to reach
Booking and sales capability — whether discovery could convert to a transaction
Content consistency — not just whether they posted, but how regularly, and whether it was building an audience over time

Where available, the assessment also pulled in review sentiment — how visitors described each business on TripAdvisor, Google, and OTA platforms. A business's own self-perception could be tested against what paying customers were actually saying.

The Tool That Made It Different

The government received what they commissioned: a scored, sector-by-sector digital baseline with maturity tier distributions, gap analysis across the full stakeholder population, and a measurement foundation for tracking future progress.

But every assessed business also received their own individual technical report.

Not a summary of the national picture. Their own scores, across all five dimensions, benchmarked against their sector average. Their specific gaps named and explained. Their single highest-return action identified — the one thing that, if done, would move the needle most.

A tour operator could open their report and see that their website scored well on content but had critical technical issues affecting mobile load time — important because the majority of international visitors were searching on mobile. A festival organiser could see that their Facebook page had strong content but posted less than once a month, and that raising posting frequency to weekly was the single highest-return action available to them, costing nothing except consistency.

This turned the assessment from a research exercise into a practical tool that every stakeholder could pick up and use the day they received it.

What the Data Showed

61% of creative industry stakeholders had minimal or no meaningful digital footprint. Tour operators fared better — outperforming creative industries on SEO, website quality, and TripAdvisor presence — but almost none had functional online booking or payment capability, a structural conversion gap that explained why better visibility wasn't translating into revenue.

The sector patterns were stark. Audiovisual led on digital maturity. Crafts and cultural heritage sites — among the most visited by tourists — scored lowest. Festivals showed high polarisation: a small number of well-run events with strong digital presence, surrounded by many with none at all.

Across all stakeholders, approximately 64% of those with social accounts posted less than once a month. Not a budget problem. A habit problem — and the kind of problem that a personalised report, naming the specific account and showing the specific posting gap, is much better placed to fix than a national recommendation.

Why This Model Is Worth Replicating

The dual-output design — individual stakeholder tools alongside a national policy dashboard — is replicable for any destination that wants its assessment investment to land at the level where change actually happens: the business.

For donors and implementing agencies, it also provides a built-in monitoring structure. Run the same assessment in 12 or 24 months, compare the scores, and the impact of any capacity-building program becomes measurable rather than argued.