When nearly 40% of your lodging tax revenue comes from vacation rentals, hotel data alone cannot tell the story of your destination.
Visit St. Pete-Clearwater represents a destination where the lodging landscape is almost as diverse as the experiences waiting outside the front door.
Across 35 miles of white-sand beaches and 22 distinct communities, visitors can spend the morning on the Gulf, explore museums and galleries in downtown St. Pete, experience local neighborhoods, and discover the mix of beach and community culture that defines the destination.
That diversity is at the heart of Visit St. Pete-Clearwater’s new Beach Culture brand campaign. It is also reflected in where visitors stay.
Hotels account for roughly 60% of the destination’s tourism development tax revenue, while vacation rentals account for approximately 40%. For Visit St. Pete-Clearwater, understanding only one side of the lodging market would mean making decisions with a major piece of the picture missing.
KeyData brings those pieces together.
“KeyData has been a vital partner for us. The product helps us understand our travelers and understand the impact our travelers have across vacation rentals and hotels.”
Eddie Kirsch, Visit St. Pete-Clearwater
The Challenge
Visit St. Pete-Clearwater needs to understand much more than what happened last month.
The organization regularly answers questions from its Tourism Development Council, local municipalities, media, marketing partners, and other stakeholders. Those conversations can range from how the overall destination is performing to what is happening within an individual community.
And with 22 cities across the destination, the questions can get specific quickly.
At the same time, Visit St. Pete-Clearwater needs to look ahead. Its team is making marketing and budget decisions before final tourism development tax data is available. Historical reporting alone cannot tell them how August and September are shaping up while they are already planning for future fiscal years.
The challenge became even more important following the hurricanes of late 2024. With 2025 representing an unusual comparison year, the team needed the flexibility to look beyond a simple year-over-year view and understand recovery against previous periods.
That requires a broader, more flexible view of lodging performance.
The Approach
Visit St. Pete-Clearwater uses KeyData multiple times each week to build that view.
Rather than separating hotels and vacation rentals into disconnected stories, the team can look at both segments to understand how the destination is pacing as a whole.
That matters in a market where both lodging types make a significant contribution to tourism.
Each month, the team uses on-the-books hotel and vacation rental performance as part of its destination metrics reporting to the Tourism Development Council. It can quickly change date ranges, compare multiple periods, and explore different performance indicators to understand what is actually driving a shift in the market.
Is revenue increasing because rates are higher? Are visitors staying for fewer nights? Is one lodging segment pacing differently from another?
Instead of stopping at the headline number, the team can dig into the story behind it.
One Destination. One Lodging Story.
For many destinations, lodging intelligence can become fragmented.
Hotel performance lives in one place. Vacation rental performance lives somewhere else. Marketing teams are left bringing reports together manually before they can answer a seemingly simple question:
How is our destination actually performing?
Visit St. Pete-Clearwater shows why that complete view matters.
With approximately 60% of tourism development tax revenue coming from hotels and 40% from vacation rentals, neither segment represents the destination on its own.
KeyData brings robust hotel data together with the industry's largest verified vacation rental dataset, supplemented responsibly with OTA data, so destination leaders can understand performance across the lodging market from one place.
For Visit St. Pete-Clearwater, that means the team can move from two pieces of the puzzle to one clearer picture.
From Destination Data to Community Value
The value of that complete picture extends well beyond the Visit St. Pete-Clearwater team.
The destination includes 22 different cities, and municipalities such as Treasure Island, Madeira Beach, and St. Pete Beach may turn to the organization for insight into local tourism performance.
KeyData helps Visit St. Pete-Clearwater provide that perspective.
The organization also shares performance with stakeholders through public Tourism Development Council meetings. Those reports are frequently picked up by local media, and lodging insights can help the team respond to additional media inquiries throughout the month.
That makes trusted, understandable data important for more than internal analysis. It helps Visit St. Pete-Clearwater become a stronger source of information for the communities it represents.
Turning Lodging Demand Into Smarter Marketing
The same data also helps shape how Visit St. Pete-Clearwater brings visitors to the destination.
The team and its marketing agency use lodging performance and visitor origin data to understand where travelers are coming from, how demand is pacing, and where future need periods may be developing.
That creates a stronger foundation for campaign planning.
Instead of relying only on historical visitation, marketers can pair what happened in the past with what is already on the books for the future.
Knowing where visitors are coming from, when they are booking, and how both hotels and vacation rentals are pacing gives the team more context for deciding where and when marketing can have the greatest impact.
Planning for Tomorrow Before Every Number Is Final
One of the biggest advantages of forward-looking lodging data is the ability to make decisions before traditional reporting catches up.
Tourism development tax data remains an important measure of accommodation performance for Visit St. Pete-Clearwater. But final tax reporting naturally arrives after the activity has already occurred.
Meanwhile, the organization is already making decisions about future budgets and strategies.
KeyData helps bridge that timing gap.
The team can see how hotels and vacation rentals are performing before all final historical reporting is available, giving leaders another source of insight as they plan upcoming fiscal years.
That means fewer decisions based solely on where the destination has been and greater visibility into where it appears to be heading.
What Changed
Visit St. Pete-Clearwater has a flexible view of lodging performance that matches the complexity of the destination itself.
The team can:
- Monitor hotel and vacation rental pacing together
- Understand performance across the full lodging market
- Compare multiple years to add context to hurricane recovery
- Identify the KPIs driving changes in destination performance
- Use visitor origin insights to inform marketing planning
- Answer questions from municipalities and community stakeholders
- Support Tourism Development Council and media reporting
- Add forward-looking context to long-range budgeting and planning
Without KeyData, much of that work would become more manual, requiring the team to export, combine, reformat, and interpret information from multiple sources.
With KeyData, the destination has a clearer place to start.
Why the Complete Lodging Picture Matters for DMOs
A destination is not a hotel market or a vacation rental market. It is a lodging market.
For DMOs, seeing both matters.
See demand across lodging types.
Understand how hotels and vacation rentals are performing without treating either segment as the entire market.
Look forward, not only backward.
Use on-the-books pacing to add context before traditional historical reporting becomes available.
Make marketing more informed.
Pair visitor origin, historical performance, and future demand to identify markets and periods that deserve attention.
Tell a clearer stakeholder story.
Give boards, municipalities, partners, and community leaders a more complete view of what tourism is doing across the destination.
Plan with greater context.
Compare years, periods, lodging segments, and KPIs to understand what is driving change, especially when unusual events make simple year-over-year comparisons less meaningful.
Results That Matter
Visit St. Pete-Clearwater is using lodging intelligence to connect marketing, planning, reporting, and community communication.
In a destination where hotels and vacation rentals both play major roles in the visitor economy, KeyData helps the organization see those segments together and understand the story behind the numbers.
That gives the team a more complete view of where demand has been, where it is today, and where it is heading next.
And as Visit St. Pete-Clearwater introduces its new Beach Culture brand to travelers, that intelligence provides an important foundation for telling another story too: what makes this destination worth experiencing.
Thirty-five miles of white-sand beaches may bring visitors to the coast. But the museums, neighborhoods, arts, restaurants, communities, and culture beyond the shoreline give them reasons to discover more.
Visit St. Pete-Clearwater is making sure its lodging data tells an equally complete story.
See Your Complete Lodging Market
Your visitors do not experience your destination in data silos. Your lodging strategy should not either.
KeyData combines verified, direct-source vacation rental data with robust hotel data and responsibly sourced OTA insights to give DMOs a more complete view of destination performance.
See what is happening across your lodging market today, understand what is already on the books, and give your stakeholders a clearer story about what comes next.
- Connected planning, reporting, and community communication
- A more complete view of demand
- Marketing plans informed by visitor origin insights
