The tourism industry is suffering from an acute labour shortage. To mitigate this gap, enhancing productivity through data-driven destination management has become imperative. Local communities therefore need to collect development-relevant data and leverage for planning and operations. Although data utilisation by non-expert users who manage tourist destinations is an important topic, only a limited number of studies have focused on it. In this research, we clarify the essential data utilisation requirements for non-expert users of urban time-series data. To derive these requirements, we examine weather forecasting, the most widely accepted and routinely employed form of time-series data utilisation. First, the end-to-end pipeline of meteorological information from data collection through analysis, prediction, and public dissemination was mapped. Next, we characterise the published data that constitute users’ points of contact with weather services, focusing on attributes such as temporal granularity and measurement scales, and highlight key considerations for collaboration with private-sector providers. From this examination, eleven features of weather forecast that foster user engagement were distilled. These features inform a set of practical requirements for ordinary users managing tourist destinations, among which are: data should be collected centrally by a public authority rather than by individual users; the authority should publish not only raw figures but also processed analytics; providing daily updated forecasts of current and future data is most important for users; and users should develop intuitive understandings of higher-scale data through repeated exposure to past data. The results offer actionable guidance for designing data utilisation that empower non-expert users to enhance tourist destination management.