Big Data for the intelligent management of tourism in Barcelona

The Big Data can effectively contribute to the digital transformation of the Spanish tourism industry by creating patterns that allow to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of services, products or businesses.To prove this, multiple projects have been launched that use mobile phone information to measure the tourist influx, national and international, in the cities.One of these initiatives tries to observe the behavior of national and international visitors for an intelligent management of tourism in Barcelona Presented in the last Mobile World Congress of 2017 , it has the collaboration of the GSMA , the Mobile World Capital , the City Hall of Barcelona , Orange and the Big Data Center of Excellence of Eurecat (group specialized in data analysis and Big Data).

Juan Antonio Torrero, Big Data Innovation Leader in Orange

tourism in Barcelona and anonymized data

As explained by Juan Antonio Torrero , responsible for Big Data of Orange, «with the data provided by Orange from autumn 2014 and July 2016 , it has been carried out various analyzes to observe the behavior of national and international tourists in the city of Barcelona, a key place in world tourism.With 32 million visitors a year of which 82.4% are international , the Tourism is one of the economic engines of the city, thus recognized by 82% of its citizens, although also 42% of them feel that the city is reaching the limit of its capacity.For this reason the objectives of this project are focused in, first, to understand the profile of the visitor (routes, origin, stay,...) and analyze new opportunities of the intelligent management of the city to improve the public infrastructure of services and transport ».

In detail, Torrero explains, « anonymized data from mobile devices has been collected during those periods in the area and attempts have been made to distinguish certain profiles and behaviors .From these data, to ensure proper analysis , the data of 5 million highly active Orange client devices (devices that had sufficient telephone events), and basic sociodemographic data (age, gender and zip code) ».

Big Data for the intelligent management of tourism in Barcelona

Analyzing this data on tourism in Barcelona, for example have detected different visitor profiles:

Hiker: Visits that start and end on the same day.It has been seen that the average duration of the visit is 4.5 hours, starting around 12 and ending around 20 hours.The majority age profile is between 35-49 years old

Tourist: visits whose beginning and end occurs on different days.In this case the average duration is 1.5 days, starting at 7:00 p.m.and ending at 1:00 p.m.during the end of week they increase around 33%, and the age profile is 25-39 years.

Night visitor: are visits that start around 6:00 p.m.and end around 6 a.m., with an average duration of 5.3 hours, starting at 9 p.m.and ending after 12 at night.The age of this visitor is between 20-24 years.

Regarding the origin, Madrid (20.5%), Valencia (9.7%) and Balearic Islands (7.6%) are the provinces of majority. Barcelona (65.5%) and elarea de Cataluna- Tarragona (8.8%), Girona (7 , 4%) and Lleida (3.5%) concentrate the largest number of hikers.

the most visited districts

«If we analyze the concentration porareas-details Juan Antonio Torrero-, we can see that the districts with the highest presence of visitors are similar, being concentrated in Eixample Dreta ( Paseo de Gracia and modernist route ), Barri Gotic (Las Ramblas), Barceloneta, Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i La Ribera (La Catedral), and Hostafrancs (Sants train station).It has also been detected that there is a large concentration of hikers in Bon Pastor (La Maquinista Shopping Center), Zona Franca and Sarria-Pedralbes (where the main access routes are to the city of Barcelona).

An interesting discovery that has emerged from the analysis of tourism in Barcelona is that, in addition to the typical attraction areas, other new areas of concentration of people have been detected: Forum, Placa Espanya, and Placa Francesc Macia.

Flows between districts have also been analyzed, reaching the conclusion that the Eixample district is the main point of origin and destination of most movements in Barcelona .

Big Data for the intelligent management of tourism in Barcelona

La Sagrada Familia

As Juan Antonio tells us Torrero , «in order to check if a more detailed level can be reached, a study has been carried out at a micro level, focused on the Sagrada Familia. Around this point of interest, in addition from the mobile phone antenna present in the area, various sensors (3D cameras, WIFI sensors) have been placed with a finer precision. With the WIFI sensors the anonymized information of the mobile phones is collected with WIFI activated, thus being able to analyze the area where they were and the movement they were following.”With the 3D cameras, people passing through a place were captured, and in this way they were counted:

With all this information, once analyzed, we have been able to obtain the main routes of visitors in the Sagrada Familia between the surrounding streets. For example in the case of journeys from the corner of Diagonal with Marina Street, we can see its concentration in the following graph:

Big Data for the intelligent management of tourism in Barcelona

In addition to this analysis on tourism in Barcelona, the time of stay has also been analyzed.Interesting results have been obtained:

50% of visitors remain in the area of the Sagrada Familia less than 40 minutes

80% of visitors stay less than 100 minutes

About 20% of visitors enter the Basilica (they stay more than 100 minutes, so they are supposed to really enter it)

Regarding the influx during the day and the week, the period of greatest influx is 10 to 12 hours. On Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays they have a similar pattern, with a higher frequency of visitors during the afternoon.Mondays are the days with the greatest variability in the number of visitors and on Fridays they are the most regular days.Regarding the place of origin, 75% of visitors in the Sagrada Familia are of national origin.

French tourists are more early risers

Here some curious results have appeared.When mixing the origin of the visitor with the visiting time patterns, it has been possible to see that there are different visitor profiles depending on the country of origin: for example, French tourists are more "early risers" than Americans.

Big Data for the intelligent management of tourism in Barcelona

«The result of this project on tourism in Barcelona has been so successful that new extensions of it are proposed that include: development of a real-time monitoring system of tourist flows, detection of unexpected concentrations of people, predictive analysis of mobility flows in the city, extension of sensors for an analysis micro of other points of interest of the city and integration of other data sources (social networks to have sentiment analysis, indoor positioning data and bank transactions through credit cards) », concludes the Big Data expert Orange.

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