The City Hall of Valencia aims to respond this question and to do so requested three complet reports, one of them to the Department of Applied Economics of the Universitat de València and focused on tourism. The objective: to know the real impact of the festivity.
21 march 2016
The Universitat de València proposed to use the data of telephone companies in order to know the number of visitors the city receives. It is estimated that Valencia welcomes more than a million tourists during Fallas, festivity that this year is a candidate to be part of the UNESCO World Heritage. However, is this number of visitors excessive? Thanks to Big Data we could be able to know with greater precision the movements and tourism during Fallas.
“Very interesting data could be obtained in collaboration with telephone companies that could be completed with surveys to determine aspects such as expense”.
According to the professor of the Department of Applied Economics of the Universitat de València, Pau Rausell, “with Big Data we could obtain much more information”, since the “current studies are focused on the presence of people in the streets and many people from the metropolitan area of Valencia could have been counted as tourists”. To do so, Rausell holds that the estimated number of tourists in Fallas could be exaggerated and this is a field in which great advances remain to be done.
In this respect, Rausell proposes to turn to data of the telephone companies to have a better knowledge of movements of people generated by this festivity. “Very interesting data could be obtained in collaboration with telephone companies that could be completed with surveys to determine aspects such as expense”, says Rausell.
“To know in detail from where and to where people move around will allow to offer better transport services”.
Through Big Data we could know with more precision the tourist displacements, and the access to these numbers will also help the City Hall of Valencia to improve public services, such as public transport, since according to Rausell: “To know in detail from where and to where people move around will allow to offer better transport services”.
Data science allows to analyse information and to extract patterns of behaviour, as well as to determine prediction models for further behaviours. So these three reports will be used by the town council to create the strategic plan for the next Fallas and will provide valuable information about the economic impact of this festivity, tourism, and also socio-anthropological aspects.
Image of the street lights of the 2016 Fallas by Víctor Pérez.
