Istat and Vodafone Business Italia have partnered to innovate tourism statistics. The two realities have created one tourism study inbound (i.e. on foreigners in Italy), outbound (Italians abroad) and domestic (Italians in Italy) integrating the official statistics with the data from mobile phones.
Vodafone Business Italia-Istat: the details of the survey
The investigation concerned the Province of Rimini and the Municipality of Roma, two areas with a strong tourist vocation, between August 2019 and August 2020. A comparison was made between iftourist luxuries before and after the pandemic and three case studies were developed: the arrivals and presences of Italian and foreign tourists; day visits by Italian and foreign tourists; departures of Italians abroad.
For carrying out the survey was used Vodafone Analytics, a technology that collects in real time i mobile phone network activity data, thus guaranteeing temporal and spatial information, with algorithms developed to meet the requirements of official statistics, in full compliance with privacy legislation.
"The use of data from the mobile network for the production of tourism statistics, already experimented at an international level, proves to be a vadded value to complement and enrich current surveys on tourism by Istat, in particular for the ability to provide information in real time and with high territorial detail", the company informs in a note in a note, underlining that "the collaboration experienced between Istat and Vodafone Business Italia represents a significant precedent, which demonstrates how telephony data can enrich and complete the production of official statistics and provide insights into emerging phenomena only partially covered by traditional data sources".
The director of Vodafone Business Italia: "A collaboration that demonstrates the statistical value of mobile data"
"The collaboration between Istat and Vodafone Business Italia demonstrates the statistical value of mobile telephony data in a complementary way to the official data for the production of tourism statistics, and opens up new possibilities in other sectors as well - he declared Lorenzo Forina, director of Vodafone Business Italia. The big data generated by Vodafone Analytics technology, aggregated and made anonymous in full compliance with privacy legislation, can open up new perspectives for analysis with a greater level of detail, such as the time dimension and precise monitoring of data on the territory. The results of this partnership with Istat will inspire new projects, accelerated by the national and European dimension of Vodafone and by the active role of Istat in the statistical community".
"These data can be used to measure many aspects of our reality in an innovative way and to create new knowledge and value-added services on data by companies, public administrations, academia and research institutions", he said Monica Pratesi, head of the Statistics Production Department of Istat.
