Research Guides: HTM 499 (Byrd): Feasibility Studies and Business Development in Hospitality and Tourism: Home

Introduction to Market Research

Types of Resources
Video Tutorials

How Do You Find Your Niche?

Industry & Market Analysis

Government Data
Industry Overviews
Market Research Reports
Trade Associations

Demographics & Consumer Habits

Who are your customers?
Where are they?
What do they care about?

Business Articles

General Business Magazines
Trade Magazines
Regional Business Publications
Newspapers

Companies

Competitors
Supply Chain
B2B Customers

When performing a hotel feasibility study, you will need to look at multiple data points including, but not limited to:

national market information
industry trends (can be found in articles and trade association publications)
local tourism information
consumer demographics

The databases and links in this guide will help you find these pieces of information, but you may need to dig deeper for local tourism information. This can include a city website, chamber of commerce, or local tourism board. If the information you need isn't online, try giving these places a call to see if they have it otherwise available.

MIdwest Tourism Sites

Data USA This link opens in a new window
Data compiled from public sources by Deloitte and Datawheel. Offers easy to digest information of occupations, industries, education, locations, and more

By State

Illinois

Indiana

Ohio

Michigan

Michigan is a tourism hot spot, so only the main state and a few regional links are listed here. There are many tourism websites for cities and counties across the state.

Where else can you check?

Local government websites
Chamber of Commerce
Local tourism sites

Market Research

Books

Restaurant, Food & Beverage Market Research Handbook 2020-2021 by Richard K. Miller
Publication Date: 2020
With a thorough and in-depth analysis of the $860 billion restaurant and foodservice industry, Restaurant, Food & Beverage Market Research Handbook provides consumer spending data, market forecasts, and trends assessments. The trends assessments include discussions of consumer behavioral trends, dining trends, daypart analysis, mealpart analysis, and more. Comprehensive demographic data for all dayparts at full-service and quick-service restaurants, as well as an analysis of restaurant spending in each state and dining statistics for metropolitan areas, are provided.

Databases

BCC Research
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Market research reports: primarily STEM (science, technology, engineering, medicine) categories like advanced materials, chemicals, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals.
Bizminer
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Choose from two main categories. Industry Financial Profile offers financial ratios and data for industry segments with sales class filters. Industry Market Profile offers demographics, competitors, market volume, and more for the entire US, states, counties, zip codes, cities, and customizable market radius.
IBISWorld Industry Reports
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Data-driven reports on industries. Each report is approximately 30-40 pages in length, providing an authoritative overview of trends, competitive forces, statistics, top companies, and more.
MarketResearch.com Academic
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Market research reports: a wide range of categories like food and beverage, technology and media, heavy industry, life science, consumer goods, and service industries.
Mintel
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Market research reports and consumer data: primarily B2C (business-to-consumer) categories like food and drinks, travel, beauty and personal care, pets, household goods, and retail and apparel.
Passport
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Aggregates industry reports, economic information, and consumer information by region and country with global coverage.
Plunkett Research
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Aggregates industry reports, company profiles, and job-seeker resources.

Trade Associations

Gale Directory Library
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Search, sort, and export a variety of information from multiple premier directories - use this database to locate approximately 460,000 international and U.S. national, regional, state, and local nonprofit membership organizations in all fields, including IRS data on U.S. 501(c) nonprofit organizations. The database is also used to monitor association trends; identify related associations; networking and making professional contacts; marketing to associations, their members and markets.
Includes:
Biography and Genealogy Master Index
Encyclopedia of Associations: International Organizations
Encyclopedia of Associations: National Organizations of the U.S.
Encyclopedia of Associations: Regional, State and Local Organizations
National Directory of Nonprofit Organizations

Articles

ABI/Inform Collection
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An all-purpose, vast business database with thousands of full-text academic journals and mainstream publications, dissertations, and working papers, including sources like The Economist, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal.
Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
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An all-purpose, vast business database with thousands of full-text academic journals and mainstream publications. Also includes thousands of case studies, SWOT analyses, industry reports, and a selection of brief company profiles.
Hospitality and Tourism Complete
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Scholarly research and industry news relating to all areas of hospitality and tourism. Contains more than 828,000 records, with coverage dating as far back as 1965. There is full text for more than 490 publications, including periodicals, company & country reports, and books.
Regional Business News This link opens in a new window
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Provides comprehensive full text coverage for regional business publications, incorporating 75 business news magazines, newspapers and newswires from all metropolitan and rural areas within the United States.

Demographics and Census Data

MRI-Simmons Catalyst
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Demographic, lifestyle, product and brand usage, and advertising media preferences reported by a sample of over 25,000 US consumers.
SimplyAnalytics
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Web-based mapping, analytics and data visualization of demographic variables, psychographic variables, and business locations. Map any area down to the US census block level. Add map data data variables and create custom reports. Includes MRI-SimmonsLOCAL and EASI customer data.

Census Data

Data USA This link opens in a new window
Data compiled from public sources by Deloitte and Datawheel. Offers easy to digest information of occupations, industries, education, locations, and more

CFED - Development Report Card for the States
The Development Report Card for the States (DRC) uses 67 measures to provide a relative, state-by-state assessment of economic development, assigning grades in three main areas: Performance (economic climate for a wage-earner), Business Vitality (economic climate for a business), and Development Capacity (how a state is positioned for the future).
STATS Indiana
STATS Indiana provides access to economic and demographic statistics for states, counties, cities and towns, townships, regions, census tracts and more.
Lafayette-West Lafayette Chamber of Commerce

Citation Management

Mendeley
This resource allows you to highlight, make notes, and mark papers as favorites and share with the rest of your group (create a private group for your project and download the desktop version in order to do this). You can create groups of up to ten members in the free version of this product. Check out their video tutorials.
Zotero