How much of your takings comes from visitors, and where are they from?

Ask anyone running a venue in the Canaries, the Balearics or on the coast what share of their takings comes from visitors and they will give you a number. Ask where they get it from and the conversation ends.

It is not negligence: it is that the data is not in one place. It is spread across three, and none of the three gets joined to the others.

Signal 1 · Who lands on your site

Analytics gives you the country and the language of every session. It is the easiest signal to have and the one almost nobody looks at with this question in mind: not “how many people came” but what proportion came from outside your island, and in what language they browse.

It has a limit worth knowing: it is traffic, not purchase. Somebody can look from Munich and never come. It is useful for sizing the interest, not for attributing takings.

Signal 2 · Which way the sale came in

This is the good one, and it is the one almost nobody has set up. When a sale arrives through a hotel, an inbound operator or an agency, that sale is a visitor. Nothing has to be inferred: the channel already says so.

For that signal to exist, every seller needs their own link and every purchase needs to be tied to it. If you sell through a concierge writing names in a notebook, the sale arrives and the data does not. And that is the normal situation in almost every venue in a tourist area: the visitor channel exists, it turns over money, and it is invisible on the dashboard.

Signal 3 · Where your reviewers are from

Google and TripAdvisor reviews carry the home city of whoever writes them, and the language they write in. It is a biased sample — whoever reviews is not whoever buys, and whoever reviews in August is not whoever reviews in February — but it is the only signal that tells you something about the profile rather than only the volume.

What this decides, which is what matters

Separating local from visitor is not an exercise in curiosity. It changes four concrete decisions:

• The campaign. A campaign aimed at someone who lives ten minutes away and one aimed at someone who is here for ten days have nothing in common, and today they get judged by the same number.
• The channel. If the visitor decides at the hotel reception, the ad budget is not the lever: the lever is being at that reception.
• Loyalty. A visitor is not coming back next month, so a retention programme built on a mostly visitor base is measuring something that is not going to happen.
• The language. If a third of your traffic browses in English and your event page is only in Spanish, that third is deciding with less information than everyone else.