How can Big Data help the tourism sector?

1.4 billion people, the equivalent of China’s population, travel around the world every year. It is by far the largest amount of all time, and it seems it’ll continue growing up. According to the World Tourism Organization, by 2030, it’ll be 1.8 billion.

The exponential growth of tourism has caused a collapse in many cities and touristic destinations. Cities like Barcelona and countries like Iceland have taken measures to limit the number of tourists they allow into their territories.

However, is that the solution? Is it worth it to reduce the possible income that may result from tourists spending? There may be an alternative solution: using Big Data to adapt to the situation.

For example, the analysis of tourists’ movement around a city can help planners to adapt the number of buses and other public transportations at peak times. This helps to reduce traffic and the collapse of public transport at certain times.

Many Latin American cities have done it with anonymous data coming from cellphones that differentiated locals from tourists to create profiles of the tourists with the help of AI to know when and where they use to go according to those profiles. Thus, they were able to produce better policies to tackle the issue, reduce pollution, and offer a better urban environment for locals and tourists.

Many large cities in Europe, the US, and Latin America hold massive music festivals around the year. Some of them, such as Tomorrowland, Glastonbury surpass 200,000 people, which creates significant policy and environmental pressure.  Such a festival is transportation, catering, and housing odyssey. However, many forget one considerable aspect: waste disposal, mainly if the festival occurs in a protected, ecological area. How to deal with so many tourists without hindering the environment? Again, Big Data.

Generally, participants have to fill a form providing some basic information, which, with the help of data analysis can help organizers to create profiles and, from there, establish an estimate of the resources needed to deal with the disposal correctly. From there, organizers and authorities can effectively manage waste disposal systems, reinforcing public transportation, and everything else they need.

Big Data here allows organizers to know the capacity of a venue: how many visitors can it hold not only considering space but also the other factors mentioned above.

That last element does not only help festival organizers, but it can also help museums. The data allows them to know how many visitors they can permit at a time without pressing the place and understanding in detail the energy, human capital, and money they need to invest in sustaining it.e

Data analysis shows museum managers peak hours and days, which rooms are the most-visited, and they can cross the data, so they have better options to deal with visitors. This allows them to reduce the waiting time and over-saturation of the venue. Coping with visitors is vital for places such as museums as they cannot increase the number of visitors infinitely but also protect a significant historical, cultural, and artistic heritage.

Big data is an ever-growing business that can help almost any industry to offer better services. Tourism is just one small example of that. Using data analysis can help policy-makers and companies provide an excellent time for tourists without hindering locals, their touristic venues, or the environment.