Understanding the movement of individuals is crucial in many study areas:
urban planning, transportation, emergencies, marketing strategies and of course
TOURISM.
A new source of data for these types of analysis is the cellular telephony that
tracks presences and movements with high precision.
The study of the dynamics of incoming and outgoing tourism, number of trips,
number of days and nights spent, number of visitors, country of residence and
provenance, main destination, secondary destination, transit and repeated visits can be
analyzed using this information.
The data, divided by country and type of presence, are available every 15 minutes
on a 150x150 meter grid.
The 35 million records a day for the Friuli Venezia Giulia region are stored in a
Geodatabase and the development of a highly parametric and user-friendly WEB GIS is
ongoing in order to transform this huge quantity of DATA into INFORMATION.
The research uses presence data and related attributes to analyze the behavior of
tourists in two different situations.
The first is a rainy day in an important seaside resort in Friuli Venezia Giulia.
Where they go, what they visit, ... depending on their origin.
The second is related to the analysis of how the presence changes during the day
and according to the origin of the visitors during an important food and wine event that
takes place annually in the city of Udine.
This information can be useful to those who organize the services, advertise the
places, suggest activities, make changes to and update the tourist guides, ....
The decision makers are showing great interest because they have realized that
the use of common sense and approximate data often leads to incorrect readings of the
phenomena and wrong organizational choices
