GIS Market Analysis: Hotel Industry

Yesterday, two urban planning students came to the library for advice about where to obtain appropriate datasets to run a gravity model ("predicts the sales potential of an area based on distance, competition, attractiveness factors, and consumer spending") on the hotel industry in Austin, TX.

Well, unbeknownst to them they were indeed in luck as occupancy and sales data for hotels are more readily available in Texas than most other industries. This is why the final project in my advanced real estate market analysis course (syllabus: Flash) is a comprehensive market analysis of the hotel industry in the DFW Metroplex.

Here is a list of free and library-acquired datasets that I am helping the urban planning students to integrate into their analysis. (These are in addition to the standard GIS layers they will need).

• Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts: Tax Files
• Free dataset
• This fantastic resource provides quarterly tax and sales data, by establishment, for hotel occupancy tax receipts, new franchise taxpayers, new sales tax permits, and mixed beverage tax receipts.
• I first discovered this incredibly open resource (especially for Texas) for a workshop I held last February, called 'Get the Most Out of a Retail Location: Maximize Mixed Drink Sales'. This workshop demonstrates how GIS can be used to provide a spatial dimension to multivariate regression analysis. The workshop documents can be downloaded here.


• Zip Code Business Patterns
• Free dataset
• Provides the number of establishments by establishment size by zip code.
• The industry code for hotels is '721110'.


• American Factfinder
• Free dataset
• This historical (yes, 2000 demographics are now historical) dataset provides block group-level data from the long form of the U.S. decennial census for 1990 and 2000.


• Reference USA
• Subscription database
• This InfoUSA product, available at many libraries, provides downloadable lists of business and residential establishments. The downloaded tables contain a geocodable address field and even contain geocoded lat/long fields if you do not wish to do the geocoding yourself.


• AGS Marketing Data
• Subscription dataset
• Provides 2005 estimates on the block group-level for demographics, consumer expenditures, business and employee counts, personal finance, crime risk, and environmental risks.