At the 9th International Forum on Tourism Statistics

I was at the OECD headquarters in Paris to attend the The 9th International Forum on Tourism Statistics. The conference covered the main themes related to the collection and analysis of quantitative tourism data, from the classic issues on visitors survey (e.g. border surveys, hotel surveys) to the coordination among countries through Tourism Satellite Accounts (TSA) to produce more advanced tourism statistics. These methods need to keep on adapting to the constant evolution of tourism and tourists behaviors. For instance, the current demographic evolution with western countries getting older produces new tourism services and reduces seasonalities. In reaction there is progress in the automatic collection of data to deliver short-term estimates in demand and supply data. However, the unique use of these traditional methods raise the risk of missing emerging phenomena and changes in tourist behavior such as the raise of trips with shorter stays or concerns in sustainability.

9th International Forum on Tourism Statistics at the OECD headquarters

In response to this evolution that requests new methodologies to capture tourist behaviors, I participated to the session dedicated on “new approaches to data collection from the supply side”.

As is the case for most or all fields of statistics where data is collected from the economic actors, there is an increasing awareness of the respondent burden. Statistical offices try to reduce or control this respondent burden by finding more efficient ways of collection the primary information (e.g. e-surveys) from for instance the accommodation establishments. To obtain more information on e.g. tourism flows or tourism activities, data producers can make use of registers or other administrative sources and combine them with the survey data.

Such sources can be general purpose sources (for instance to obtain more detailed geographical information such as urban versus rural tourism) or can be tourism-related sources (e.g. specific tourist taxes or eco-labels awarded to enterprises in the tourism sector).

This session wants to contribute to exchanging national or regional practices that are not entirely linked to country or region-specific information systems and therefore have relevance for a larger group of tourism statisticians. In addition, this session also aims at getting a better understanding of estimations methods for private or non-rental accommodation, to complete the statistics on collective accommodation. Indeed, a very significant share of tourists stays in private rented accommodation or free accommodation. To get a comprehensive insight into the total tourism flows into a country, estimates of these less visible types of accommodation are indispensable.

I presented the paper Uncovering the presence and movements of tourist from user-generated content (en français) in which in discuss the opportunity in using implicit (cellular network traffic) and explicit (georeferenced photos) digital footprints to uncover novel evidences and anecdotes on urban tourism (slides of my talk):

In recent years, the large deployment of mobile devices has led to a massive increase in the volume of records of where people have been and when they were there. The analysis of these spatio-temporal data can supply high-level human behavior information valuable to social scientists, urban planners and local authorities. This paper explores this hypothesis by reporting on new information revealed by this pervasive user-generated content. We present novel techniques, methods and tools we have been developing to explore the significance of these new types of data. In a case study of Rome, Italy, we showcase the ability to uncover the presence and movements of tourists from geo-referenced photos they explicitly make public, as well as from network data implicitly generated by users of mobile phones.

In a similar line of research Michel Houée (Odit France, France) presented an exploratory work on Estimating foreign visitors from highways toll payments. This methods used credit cards payments at French highway toll stations as digital footprints of visitors in transit. Thanks to the merging of estimates from all cooperating networks, it is possible to . The analysis of these data give produce a global picture of the visits for each toll station serving the French territory, in terms of volume as well as in terms of proportion of the total foreign visits. For instance it gives insights on the split by nationality of visits of a specific tourist location over a whole year, point out the differences of monthly seasonality profile among the nationalities, and when the cooperation is ancient like with the ASF network, it is possible to analyze visit trends according to the nationality. The first major validation consists in checking the accuracy of the estimation of the traffic of each nationality during the survey period as compared to the counts

Using the information at toll barriers along the networks at peak periods of visit of France, it is possible to identify the main routes followed and to observe how the traffic decreases progressively from the entrance gateways up to border points of exit from the French territory (figure below).

Germans in summer: a high proportion of transit towards Spain

A flow that I also capture when entering Spain from France with my Flickr data gathered for the south of France, Spain and Portugal (figure below, second map from the right).

Main flows of visiting photographers in the Iberian Peninsula in 2007

My work on georeferenced photos and cellular network traffic analysis in Rome was rather well perceived as a potential cost alternative approach that can improve the timeliness of the data collection. The limitations are known, the data do not cover exactly a territory and needs strong calibration with more traditional data with respect to privacy. However, they contain some evidences and anecdotes that add “energy” (i.e. a more qualitative angle, and reactivity) to analysis based on traditional quantitative data. This goes well with the utility to build tools to support decision-making but also support a discussion process.

Relation to my thesis: my works frames well with current concerns in the domain of tourism statistics does not want to miss emerging behaviors (influence of ICTs on tourism) and trends (use of ICTs to grasp these behaviors). Solutions based on the analysis of digital footprints can potentially capture what traditional methods can’t, in a cost and time effective manner.