The Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, Reyes Maroto, today presented DATAESTUR, www.dataestur.es , a single national tourism data site where you can access the figures from different sources of information.
Maroto, who has been accompanied by the president of SEGITTUR, Enrique Martinez, has underlined the importance of having all the data in a single site, since this will help to have a single point of reference where to consult the information of the tourism sector in our country.
"Public managers will deploy better tourism policies if they have adequate data," said Maroto, who has emphasized the triple purpose of these actions: "To generate better public knowledge of the main magnitudes of tourism, to identify the public and private sources that can be useful to know the sector or make decisions about it, and design a system of production and access to data linked to the management of public problems of destinations, "added the minister.
The website starts with public tourism data, from traditional sources such as the National Institute of Statistics, the Bank of Spain, AENA, Puertos del Estado or Turespaña, among others, which will be updated as the official source does.
Structure of the data
The data will be structured in five categories: general data – arrivals of international tourists-; economy –tourist spending, contribution to GDP, employment-; transport – air passengers, passenger traffic through ports, trains and roads- and accommodation – hotel occupancy, price of accommodation – and knowledge – active listening, SICTUR and scientific tourism magazines-.
In addition to public data, it includes private data, in this case of the telephone operator Telefónica.
This initiative is part of a more ambitious project in which data analysis constitutes the basis for improving tourist knowledge, while at the same time helping to increase Spain's competitiveness as a tourist destination.
In this context of the data, a knowledge area has been created where active listening reports will be published with information about what is said on social networks about Spain as a tourist destination, as well as the interests of tourists when traveling to Spain Information that will be very useful for destination managers to better understand the behavior of tourists on the Internet at different stages of the trip.
"The power of data, key to knowledge"
Before the DATAESTUR presentation, the round table "The power of data, key to knowledge" took place with the participation of the Secretary of State for Tourism, Fernando Valdes; the president of the INE, Juan Manuel Rodriguez; Juan Jesus Garcia, Head of Industry Affairs, European Union, from Amadeus and the data journalist from El País, Kiko Llaneras, moderated by Eduardo Parra, Professor of Digital Economy and Tourism at the University of La Laguna.
The Secretary of State for Tourism has underlined that data management is going to become a fundamental element that will allow Spain to make a competitive difference with respect to other destinations. For this reason, the modernization plan for the tourism sector, which will be financed with European funds, makes a firm commitment to the digitization of our companies and tourist destinations, with an investment of 355 million euros. Valdés has referred to the "unique opportunity" that opens up with the data economy to create new jobs throughout the territory and develop the digital skills of current workers.
The president of the INE has explained that they are working on new statistics for tourism adapted to the new times in which mobile data, bank cards and web scrapping will be incorporated. Rodríguez has pointed out the importance of having more granular data and with a higher update frequency.
For Juan Jesús García, “the isolated data has no value. To turn it into intelligence, it has to carry out an analysis that allows it to help in decision-making ”. For his part, the journalist Kiko Llaneras has insisted on the importance of the granularity of the data, "since it provides more power for analysis and is of greater interest to the citizen."