Last month we introduced our new partner, the DISIT (Distributed Systems and Internet Technologies) Lab of the University of Florence. Today we’d like to tell you a little more about the open online platform they have developed, and that we will use to build the HERIT-DATA online platform for tourism management.

Snap4City is a 100% open source platform that provides services and data to several cities, public and private organizations, and research institutions. It is used to support the improvement of city services, security and safety in real scenarios, and to provide tools to monitor the city status.

This platform is already used by several cities and territories. For example, the municipality of Florence uses it as the reference platform to collect and analyse data for its Smart City Control Room. Here you can access to the specific page.

The City of Antwerp and its police department is using Snap4City to monitor the number of people accessing to strategic locations in the city, like museums or sport areas, including during public events. Here you can access to the specific page.

How is the Snap4city platform going to be used within HERIT-DATA? The six pilot sites of Florence, Pont du Gard, Mostar, Dubrovnik, Valencia and Ancient Olympia will use Snap4city as the dashboard for the collection and analysis of data coming from the sensors, devices and other tools that they will have set up.

Snap4city will enable the creation of a Dashboard and the computation of Key Performance Indicators.
This data will be analysed with a particular attention to the aspects related to tourism management: people flow, attractions, services, etc.

While we #StayedAtHome, events became online webinars. We decided to give you a synthesis of one of UNWTO’s webinars exploring how we can use data to plan tourism recovery from the Covid-19 crisis!
There is a lot of data available on air travel, the hotel industry, bookings and customers’ perceptions. Even though this data can be distressing, with the tourism market severely impacted by the Covid-19 crisis, we should bear in mind that at least we have this data, and we can use it to work on tourism recovery, unlike previous crisis such as the SARS pandemic in 2003 and 9/11. In fact, data enables DMOs to use their marketing budget in the most relevant way.
Another insight from the webinar is that people want to travel -but they will travel where they can. Therefore, we can expect domestic and leisure travel to rebound faster than international and business travel.
In addition, we can also expect that destinations that have had few Covid-19 cases, such as Greece, and destinations that have adopted clear and strict sanitary rules such as Portugal, will attract more visitors than other destinations. In fact, the perception of sanitary safety will be key for tourism rebound.
Other elements to take in account when planning tourism recovery are:
- the e-reputation of a destination,
- residents' sentiments on tourism,
- lessons learnt from countries that were affected first, such as China.

The conclusion of the webinar was that tourism will eventually rebound and that staying united is key for a global tourism recovery!

You can listen to the recorded webinar here and look at the graphic recording here!