The Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau (PMVB) has long excelled at promoting one of the most scenic and vibrant year-round travel destinations on the east coast, the Pocono Mountains Region of Pennsylvania. They have a unified, member-first tourism strategy, creative seasonal event-based campaigns, a fully in-house marketing team, designers, and a 24/7 television station, all of which make PMVB an industry leader and early adopter of current trends in destination marketing. With the goal of being ready to take advantage of the marketing and AI tools of the future, PMVB partnered with Red Oak Strategic to take ownership of their data in a centralized and scalable data lake. Designed for convenient viewership of analytics, strategic decision making, and built for the future, this project is at the core of how Red Oak Strategic helps businesses harness the power of their data.
The impact of this ongoing project is already clear: 20+ data critical data sources have been integrated into the data lake and standardized for analytics use. More than 115 metrics that PMVB use to track the health of the community and its members are now available online through this custom interactive Amazon Quicksight Dashboard. Gen AI powered Amazon Q allows for natural language queries directly against the data lake, generating insights, reports, and dashboards without the need for code or technical expertise. Internally, the use of Amazon Clean Rooms to allow for double-encypted data collaborations have opened up a pathway to secure analytics that use first-party data to measure the impact of marketing campaigns in an intuitive and customer-friendly manner . The success of this PMVB data lake project is a perfect example of how smart, data-first organizations can adopt modern analytics solutions to reach new horizons.
Red Oak Strategic (ROS) designed and implemented an AWS-powered unified data lake tailored to PMVB’s tourism and hospitality data landscape. This solution integrates various data sources (e.g., hotel performance, short-term rentals, social media, weather), cleans and standardizes the data, stores both the raw and cleaned data in Amazon S3, and displays insights on Amazon QuickSight.
The PMVB Data Lake seamlessly integrates raw data from diverse external data sources such as CoStar, Key Data, Meta, and more, ingested into an Amazon S3 storage via various API connections, or scheduled direct data deliveries, or event-driven processes. This raw data then undergoes rigorous processing, cleaning, and standardization using AWS Lambda, Glue, EC2, and Athena, ensuring a usable and structured format. For secure data collaboration, AWS Clean Rooms are utilized. The refined, clean data is stored in S3, ready for deep analysis and deployed for actionable insights through tools such as Amazon Athena, QuickSight dashboards, and AI-driven BI reporting generated by Amazon Q, all contributing to strategic, data driven decision-making for the PMVB and its partner organizations.
PMVB has transitioned from reactive reporting to a proactive, data-driven organization, operating with a clear, centralized view of its tourism and hospitality landscape. The PMVB QuickSight Dashboard is an interactive online platform, embedded on the PMVB website and accessible via this interactive Amazon Quicksight Dashboard, that serves as a centralized view of its tourism and hospitality landscape. Built directly on top of the PMVB's data pipeline and S3-based data lake, it consolidates over 115 key metrics from previously siloed data sources for tracking and forecasting the health of the community and its members, providing a unified view of tourism data. The QuickSight system supports various user roles, including admins and readers, and offers advanced analytics features such as ML-powered forecasting, Gen AI powered executive summaries, interactive tooltips, and filtering capabilities, empowering PMVB to transition from reactive reporting to a proactive, data-driven organization.
With Amazon Q Data Stories, the PMVB can leverage Gen AI to create various drafts of reports tailored to their specific business needs, such as tracking seasonal visitor trends or campaign performance for the Poconos region for different business verticals. These reports can then be refined by formatting text, adding images, editing visuals, incorporating new content blocks and charts, and applying appropriate themes, animations, and style, ensuring they resonate with the Poconos' unique brand and messaging. Leaders from PMVB have shared reports ranging from marketing docs on their NASCAR event to outreach strategy during their off-season with their partner organizations with the purpose of disseminating timely insights about the regional tourism and hospitality landscape.
Poconos liked their dashboard, but wanted to allow their audience a way to explore their data more. We turned on Gen AI powered Amazon Q Topics which allows users to ask questions in plain English and follow along as Q reviews their datasets and generates insights with relevant charts. This has been extremely beneficial for PMVB. In one case, a user using Q made an important discovery regarding how much of their YouTube spend was related to children's content. They were then able to adjust their spend in accordance with their goals. That is just one example of how Amazon Q Topics enable the PMVB to define a collection of datasets representing specific subject matters, such as Sales, Media, Marketing, etc., allowing users to ask questions directly about the particular data or metrics.
Amazon Clean Rooms is an AWS service implemented by ROS that allows the PMVB team to engage in a secure, privacy-safe data collaboration with partners concerned about sharing their raw or sensitive data. With the integration of Clean Rooms, PMVB is able to securely explore first-party attribution, for example tracing what percentage of resort visitors had seen a PTN spot or come to the Poconos website within 90 days of booking. Now, PMVB can also return insights back to partners, enabling first-party attribution analysis with tourism partners and ensuring accuracy and precision in campaign ROI measurement.
External platforms & APIs: CoStar, YouTube, Google BigQuery, Google Analytics, Basis, Key Data, AirDNA, Meltwater, Vimeo, Agorapulse, Arrivalist, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, STR, NOAA, and more.
Delivery methods & file types: CSV, XLSX, ZIP, JSON (via email attachments, S3 drops, or manual uploads).
Direct connectors: Google Ads API, Meta Graph API, NOAA weather endpoints, Key Data API, etc.
Data Integration (middle of the funnel):
Scalable ETL: AWS Lambda + Pandas (with Step Functions/EventBridge orchestration) for cleaning, backoff and retry logic, schema enforcement, and Parquet normalization.
Storage layers: “Raw” and “Clean” zones in Amazon S3 (e.g., costar-clean/, google/, keydata_clean/, meta/, weather-poconos/).
Catalog & governance: AWS Glue Data Catalog + Lake Formation for schema registration, fine‑grained permissions, and searchable metadata.
Query / modeling: Amazon Athena for SQL type querying, and cost‑controlled queries powering downstream dashboards and Clean Rooms.
Generate Insights (bottom of the funnel):
Dashboards & stories: Interactive AWS QuickSight dashboards (embedded on the PMVB website) with AI‑driven narratives via Amazon Q Topics and Q Data Stories; standardized color palette, rolling averages, and highlight rules applied.
Advanced analytics: Cross‑source comparisons (CoStar ↔ Meta, Google, Key Data, Weather), annual min/median/max tables, trend analyses, weather‑alert pipelines, and other insight scripts captured in our notebooks/Lambda jobs.
Privacy‑first collaboration: AWS Clean Rooms for secure partner analysis and insight sharing without exposing underlying raw data.
Outcome: Actionable, stakeholder‑ready intelligence (the “light‑bulb” at the base of the funnel) that drives data‑informed decisions for PMVB and its partners.
The project has significantly improved the PMVB’s data operations, decision-making agility, and partner collaboration:
This deployment has enabled the Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau (PMVB) to shift from fragmented, reactive reporting to a unified, proactive data strategy. With the new AWS-powered data lake architecture in place, PMVB can now quickly access insights across dozens of previously siloed sources ranging from lodging and transportation to advertising performance and seasonal conditions.
Stakeholders no longer need to wait for quarterly digests or rely on anecdotal observations. Instead, decision-makers across PMVB and its partner ecosystem can explore real-time dashboards, perform historical comparisons, and dig into campaign and visitor trends with minimal delay or technical overhead.
By unifying data from more than 20 sources into a secure, query-ready lake, PMVB has created a centralized lens into its regional tourism economy. This foundation allows leadership to measure marketing ROI, anticipate visitor behaviors, and align efforts across government, tourism boards, and private operators.
The architecture’s use of AWS Clean Rooms and privacy-first access controls ensures that partner collaboration remains compliant and trustworthy, an essential factor when sharing insights across organizations. That means local hotels, resorts, and regional attractions can participate in joint analytics without exposing sensitive business information.
Furthermore, this Data Lake project demonstrates how cloud-native architecture, serverless analytics, and modern tools can unlock real business value, even in legacy-heavy or highly distributed sectors like tourism and hospitality. PMVB’s data lake is more than just a technical milestone; it’s a model for how regional institutions can drive smarter economic development with secure, scalable analytics infrastructure. We thank them for their partnership and their dedication.
Key AWS Services in-play:
S3 Data Lake: A centralized S3-based data lake storing unlimited amounts of structured and semi-structured data tourism, event, and marketing data.
AWS Lambda: 24 (and counting) unique Lambda functions power data ingestion pipelines.
AWS Glue: Over 96+ database tables organize raw and transformed datasets.
Amazon Athena: Enables fast, serverless querying across the S3 lake.
Amazon ECR: A fully managed container registry service that makes it easy to store, manage, share, and deploy PMVB container images and artifacts.
Amazon EventBridge: A serverless event bus service that makes it easy to connect applications using data from various sources (e.g.: S3 Event to Lambda Trigger to ECR)
Amazon QuickSight: Delivers internal and external dashboards, and Q AI-powered narratives.
Amazon API Gateway: Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that helps developers create, publish, and manage APIs (e.g.: Embedded dashboard to PMVB website).
Lake Formation: Fine-grained access control and "both role based access control (RBAC) and attribute based access control (ABAC) across all tables in the data lake"
AWS Clean Rooms: Facilitates privacy-safe data collaboration with external marketing and lodging partners.
Governance & Security:
IAM + Lake Formation for domain-level access
S3 Access Logging for audit trails
API Gateway to gate external data APIs
Cost Explorer to optimize long-term storage and queries
CloudTrail & CloudWatch for monitoring
Clean Rooms (privacy-first):