Analysis of the Tourist Presence and Movements Using Cell Phone Data and Geomatics

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