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Posts tagged ‘flickr’

12/12/2011

tdrlogoblack94

Data 2.0 as an indicator to launch new tourism products

Cities, regions and travel-related businesses such as hotels or travel agencies are constantly looking for a way to differentiate from their competitors in order to attract new tourists, within an industry where the price factor is many times key for consumers to decide for a destination, a hotel or a travel package.

In addition to this, regions usually depend too much on certain destinations, lacking of diversification and therefore experiencing concentration of tourists in a few cities or even on a single one. That is the case of Catalonia, where Barcelona represents more than 50% of all the tourist pernoctations in Catalonia. Moreover, most of the tourists that visit some other places in Catalonia, usually visit Barcelona as well.

Therefore, we find that tourism  institutions need to put into value new destinations, in order to spread the profits and the impact of tourism all around their territory. Similarly, tourism businesses need to increase their competitiveness, by launching new products to diversify their portfolio and attract new customers.

In this context, data 2.0 appears as a new way to better understand tourist preferences. In our new project, Flickr stands out as an indicator that can show us what places within a region tourists like to visit the most, depending on the season or their nationality for example. Through this analysis, any business can offer new and demand-adapted travel packages to their customers.  Additionally, institutions can access to data about tourists travelling around their regions, something they usually lack, because many times these visits are simple getaways of one day, wihout hotel pernoctations. Again, data 2.0 happens to be an effective way to complement available data 1.0 or even to analyze preferences and habits where data 1.0 fails to do it.

With Barcelona’s tourists travelling around Catalonia, we have wondered where tourists visiting Barcelona like to go somewhere else in Catalonia, depending on the time of the year. This information aims to help all tourism business and institutions to better understand their current and potential customers.

Take a look at this project.

 

December 12, 2011  

10/06/2011

tdrlogoblack94
2 Comments

Tourists’ behavior patterns in Barcelona on the air: but still more to come

It took us a little bit more than we expected (bit busy around here), but today we are glad to announce that our project about tourists’ behavior patterns in Barcelona is on the air. Well, at least the first part of the final work we would like to complete, because we keep on working in a second part, which will be published very soon.

With this first part we have built two maps that gather more than 42,000 geolocated pics taken in Barcelona during a period of a year. One of the maps (built with Geocommons) provides with information about the major areas of tourists concentration all over the city. At the same time, we built 30 polygons for the Top 30 tourists attraction areas in Barcelona, so we can take a look at which of them are most visited. The other map (built with Google Fusion Tables) allows you to play with several filters in order to identify how behavior patterns changes according to variables such as the day of the week, the hour, the country of origin or the weather.

You can play with our maps by yourself but as a sign of how we understand data research at The Data Republic, we have published a report to bring you some of the major conclusions of the analysis, together with some graphs.

 

But we thought that this was not enough because we have many more questions still to answer. Now, we would like to analyze the impact of tourism over the occupation of public space all over the city. We want to compare the number of tourists in certain areas with variables such as population or number of businesses, so we can visualize which neighborhoods are above or below the average and, therefore, which have a greater or lesser degree of  saturation.

To be continued…

Read the complete project and play with the maps

 

June 10, 2011   2 Comments

05/05/2011

tdrlogoblack94

What are the most frequented places by tourists on a rainy day?

There are dozens of businesses related to tourism, like travel agencies, hotels and restaurants or just small businesses in the retail sector.

Photo by herman van hulzen

For some local businesses such as souvenir and gifts stores, a restaurant, a cab company or a bicycle rental business, it is important to know where to find the tourists (their potential customers) in a city. We all know the great icons of each one: Times Square in NYC, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Prado Museum in Madrid and the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. But, are you sure you know all the city corners where you can find them? And moreover, do you know which ways and streets do they use to reach those spots?

Furthermore, there are different variables that may determine the behavior of tourists such as the day of the week (weekdays vs weekends), the weather (rain or sunshine) or their nationality and habits associated. Do you know what things do tourists do or what places do they go on a rainy day?, or on heatwave day at 30 º C? or on a Tuesday? and, do U.S. tourists visit the same places than the Italians?

We want to analyze the behavior patterns of tourists from public information online, and discover where they move, considering seasonal and climatic variables. Our first test will be based in Barcelona, ​​choosing a period of 365 days, between March 1st 2010 and March 1st 2011.

Let’s see what happens!

May 5, 2011