ForwardKeys is working with partners on a new initiative to better understand how tourists move around and spend their time in destinations. Our pioneering project, GEOTURISTA, is generating new insights into visitor behaviour by analysing geospatial mobility data in destinations, and at specific sites or attractions.
GEOTURISTA brings together a consortium of three expert organisations and has secured substantial funding from SEGITTUR, a Spanish state-funded tourism innovation company, as part of its "Última Milla I" programme supporting the digital transformation of the tourism sector. The 14-month project, running from May 2023 to September 2024, is coordinated by ForwardKeys alongside project partners EVENTS & TRAVEL, a destination management company (DMC), and the EURECAT research centre.
Clustering tourists based on their movements and preferences
A key goal for GEOTURISTA is to develop a scalable methodology for clustering tourists according to their movements and the places they visit, in order to build a detailed picture of different visitor profiles. To achieve this, the research uses association rules and other advanced algorithms to analyse and interpret the wealth of geolocation data generated by tourists' mobile devices as they explore a destination.
As project coordinator, ForwardKeys is responsible for the technical aspects of the research and the eventual integration of the algorithms developed into its industry-leading suite of tourism intelligence products. Destination management company EVENTS & TRAVEL is helping guide the analysis from an industry perspective as the end user of the resulting insights. The EURECAT research centre, as a subcontractor to ForwardKeys, is focusing on the core data analysis and modelling which underpins the initiative.
“By applying association rules to complex geospatial and temporal data in an innovative way, GEOTURISTA identifies patterns in the places visited and not visited by tourists. Our analysis encompasses other variables such as visitor demographics, place of residence and travel preferences to build a detailed profile of tourist behaviour for different visitor segments and nationalities.”
Maria Tomas
GEOTURISTA project manager
Insights for DMOs and tourism businesses
In addition to integration with ForwardKeys' own solutions, another outcome being developed through GEOTURISTA is a new dashboard tool enabling destination management organisations (DMOs) and tourism businesses to explore different aspects of tourist behaviour at the destination level. Users can access key visitor metrics including demographics, preferences, choice of entry airport and airline, points of interest (POIs) visited and economic impact for their destination as a whole and for specific events. They can also benchmark major events to understand how they compare in attracting different visitor profiles.
Initial results validate ForwardKeys’ approach
Although the project is still in progress, the GEOTURISTA team have already generated some promising initial results. Findings on visitor dispersion within the Spanish city of Valencia, for example, are able to clearly show the differing patterns of mobility among domestic and international visitors, with the former exploring a wider range of neighbourhoods and the latter concentrating mainly on established tourism hotspots and famous attractions.
Another achievement has been the development of an automated process for generating a definitive list of points of interest POIs for a city and assigning them to different categories, such as cultural attractions or nightlife. Each POI is also given a score indicating its relative importance for different tourist profiles. By creating a precise "geofence" around each POI, the GEOTURISTA algorithms are able to determine exactly when a visitor enters and leaves that place.
“The process of identifying the most relevant POIs for tourists within a destination, and accurately matching visitor movements to those locations, is an essential foundation for the detailed clustering of tourist behaviour that GEOTURISTA aims to achieve. We're excited to have created an automated methodology to expedite this data annotation process, and to see it working so effectively in our initial results.”
Javier Dominguez
