Introduction to Tourism Prof.

Ma Aiping BISU

Methodological framework for producing national

tourism statistics from mobile positioning data
Annals of Tourism Research, Vol (81)
Erki Saluveera , Janika Raunb, Margus Tirua , Laura Altinb , Jaanus Kroonc , Tarass Snitsarenkoc ,
Anto Aasab , Siiri Silm

Reasons why I chose this topic

 The reasons why I have chosen this topic is that 1) I want to know about the
Mobile Positioning data such as how it is useful in producing tourism statistics,
2) how the Mobile positioning data is processed, 3) the strengths and weakness
of using MPD in tourism statistics.

Aims of this paper

 The aims of this paper are 1) to describe the method for tourism statistics from
mobile positioning data for Estonia country and 2) to evaluate the
representatives of results derived from mobile positioning data compared with
traditional accommodation statistics.

Things what I learnt from this paper

 In this article, I have learnt new things about the MPD, what the methodology
framework for producing tourism statistics through Mobile Positioning Data is,
the strength and weakness of using MPD and traditional data sources such as
accommodation statistics, border-crossing statistics, visitor surveys, and general
knowledge about other new emerging datasets used in tourism statistics such as
big data, user-generated content, transaction data and sensors.

 I have found the most popular tracking technologies used in tourism research is
GPS tracking, Mobile Positioning Data, Bluetooth Tracking, Photo database.
Before reading this article, I knew traditional statistical data methods such as
surveys, data from accommodation establishments, and data from immigrations
to produce the national tourism statistics. Nowadays, new data sources have
been implemented in producing tourism statistics because traditional data
sources have some weakness points such as smaller sample, high cost, including
bias, double counting, unreported data due to tax advantage in generating from
accommodation establishments, etc.
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 This paper showed that the use of Mobile Positioning Data (MPD) in producing
official tourism statistics in Estonia. MPD can be used to measure the volume of
tourists, to analyze tourists and trip-related characteristics (country of origin,
time, length and spatial extent of visits).

 Advantages of this using MPD – Automatic production

Cost effectiveness
Evaluate for larger sample
Good consistency and resolution of
data in time and space

 Weakness of using MPD - Get access from MNOs

Lack of qualitative information (Trip
purpose, transport mode, preferences,
etc)
Difficulties in quality assessment

 Only two countries in the world using MPD to produce national tourism
statistics – Estonia & Indonesia

 In the process of tourist visitor detection from MPD, there are included: Data
Description, Data Cleaning (removing duplicates data, removing erroneous data,
removing technical subscribers’ data and removing travel SIM card data), Visit
detection (removing occasional roaming visits and sailors’ visits), Identifying
visitor groups other than tourists.

 When the data from getting MPD are compared to the data of accommodation
establishments, they are strongly correlated with each other (for inbound
tourism). It indicates that MPD enables the generation of tourism statistics the
combination of MPD with traditional methods (e.g survey) could generate more
comprehensive tourism statistics and facilitate cost surveys. But for outbound
tourism, there are differences between official accommodation statistics and
MPD because the main problem is the lack of official accommodation statistics.

 MPD are useful for predicting the number of nights spent at official
accommodation establishments but the results are not as clear for outbound visits
because there are almost no data available to compare them.
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Practical Implications
 If we move forward with using MPD in carrying out the production of tourism
statistics, we need to focus on these things : we need to develop better regulation
and legislation in order to guarantee access to data and need cooperation
between mobile network operators (MNO), national statistical institutes,
governments

 The use of MPD could be a solution for calculating tourism statistics.

Report by Ms. ZU ZU MAY

Beijing International Studies University