Analysis of Visitors from their Digital Activities

Last week I was at Donosti-San Sebastian, to give a short presentation of my research at the The First International Conference on the Measurement and Economic Analysis of Regional Tourism. In the session, “New Instruments for Measuring and Modelling Tourism Flows”, I delivered my classic spiel “Analysis of Visitors from their Digital Activities” that covered:

1. the ability to reveal aspects of visitors experience of a city/region from their digital activities
2. the opportunities to evaluate urban strategies

I have added some notes and references to augment my slides.

Prior to my talk, Carlos Arce provided a complete scan on the new instruments and techniques to measure travel behaviors, mentioning the battles in persuading people and organizations to participate to survey and the necessity to “sell better” the value of these kind of analysis (impact, opportunity and efficiency; for special need population or special areas (eco-tourism)).

Following the other presentations, it seems there are not many innovations that can surpass the power of paper+pencil to measure travel behaviors. Back in the Simpliquity days, we inspired from this traditional technique to develop a very simple technological solution for Detecting air travel to survey passengers on a worldwide scale. This approach contrasted with the quest for perfect data some statisticians seem to lose themselves in, some requesting a mandatory Galileo reporting system for each vehicle in function in the EU. I mean, Europe can be more creative than that! Fortunately, some statisticians do not seem well-armed with a consistent argumentation to get what they do not have, considering the barrier they already face (privacy, propriety, silos, data quality, evaluation of their models). I particularly expected to experience more discussions on the transformation of measures and analysis into politics and strategies (and their evaluations).

Last week, Nicolas was also invited in a keynote address to discuss the near future of tourism services based on digital traces.

Señor!

Thanks to CICtourGUNE and particularly to Ibon for the invitation!

It seems our work has inspired others very recently: Explorando otras fuentes de datos: Flickr y el turismo and Redes sociales y turismo: flickr + Canarias.