Utilizing mobile positioning data in tourism: Who are the foreign visitors in Slovakia? When do they come and where they stay?

Abstract

One of the ways of studying the movement and behaviour of tourists is related to the use of mobile phones. The paper introduces the applicability of mobile positioning, which refers to the large-scale location data of subscribers of mobile network operators that are processed and stored in operators’ systems. For tourism studies we use the database of the locations of roaming (foreign phones) call activities in network cells. A depersonalized dataset was collected by the mobile positioning company Market Locator from the network of three major Slovak mobile operators. The key task was to find a suitable methodological approach to extract useful information for tourism studies. We have used a simple algorithm to extract “tourists” from a larger dataset of all phone activities of foreign mobile users in Slovakia. Extracting the group of tourist we have modelled the seasonal pattern of visitor flows to destinations. The results proved that mobile positioning data has a potential for applications in tourism studies, but there is still the question of extracting more precise information from the quantitative database with limited features.