Feasibility Study on the Use of Mobile Positioning Data for Tourism Statistics

Recent developments in information and communications technologies (ICT) have left their mark on tourism and travel. New technologies to improve and develop tourism services can also be used to measure and monitor tourism activities. individual GPS tracking, internet-based picture uploading websites, location-based social media check-ins, interactive tour-guides. One of the ways of studying the movement and behaviour of tourists is related to the use of mobile telephones. Mobile positioning data in this project refer to the large-scale location data of subscribers of mobile network operators that are processed and stored in operators' systems. This is highly sensitive but also very valuable data that could be used anonymously and aggregated thus ensuring the privacy of the subscribers and providing valuable insights in fields like tourism statistics.

The aim of this project is to assess the possibilities of enhancing tourism statistics through the integration of poisitioning data from mobile communication networks. The study is initiated on behalf of Eurostat and conducted by Positium (Estonia), Statistics Finland, Statistics Estonia, the French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, Development and Networks, the Institute for Tourism Research in Northern Europe (Germany) and the University of Tartu.

The project was in progress from January 2013 to June 2014. You can access the results on the Reports section of this page or on the projects section of Eurostat's tourism domain site.