Tourism Event Analytics with Mobile Phone Data

• Published in: ACM/IMS transactions on data science 2021-08, Vol.2 (3), p.1-22
• Main Authors: Leng, Yan, Noriega, Alejandro, Pentland, Alex
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2691-1922
• DOI: 10.1145/3479975

Tourism has been an increasingly significant contributor to the economy, society, and environment. Policy-making and research on tourism traditionally rely on surveys and economic datasets, which are based on small samples and depict tourism dynamics at a low granularity. Anonymous call detail record (CDR) is a novel source of data with enormous potential in areas of high societal value: epidemics, poverty, and urban development. This study demonstrates the added value of CDR in event tourism, especially for the analysis and evaluation of marketing strategies, event operations, and the externalities at the local and national levels. To achieve this aim, we formalize 14 indicators in high spatial and temporal resolutions to measure both the positive and the negative impacts of the touristic events. We exemplify the use of these indicators in a tourism country, Andorra, on 22 high-impact events including sports competitions, cultural performances, and music festivals. We analyze these touristic events using the large-scale CDR data across 2 years. Our approach serves as a prescriptive and a diagnostic tool with mobile phone data and opens up future directions for tourism analytics.