Innovative Tools for Tourism and Cultural Tourism Impact Assessment

Tarmo Kalvet, Maarja Olesk, Marek Tiits and Janika Raun
Additional contact information
Tarmo Kalvet: Institute of Baltic Studies, Lai 30, 51005 Tartu, Estonia
Maarja Olesk: Institute of Baltic Studies, Lai 30, 51005 Tartu, Estonia
Marek Tiits: Institute of Baltic Studies, Lai 30, 51005 Tartu, Estonia
Janika Raun: Department of Geography, Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Tartu, 51005 Tartu, Estonia

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 18, 1-30

Abstract: The importance of data and evidence has increased considerably in policy planning, implementation, and evaluation. There is unprecedented availability of open and big data, and there are rapid developments in intelligence gathering and the application of analytical tools. While cultural heritage holds many tangible and intangible values for local communities and society in general, there is a knowledge gap regarding suitable methods and data sources to measure the impacts and develop data-driven policies of cultural tourism. In the tourism sector, rapid developments are particularly taking place around novel uses of mobile positioning data, web scraping, and open application programming interface (API) data, data on sharing, and collaborative economy and passenger data. Based on feedback from 15 European cultural tourism regions, recommendations are developed regarding the use of innovative tools and data sources in tourism management. In terms of potential analytical depth, it is especially advisable to explore the use of mobile positioning data. Yet, there are considerable barriers, especially in terms of privacy protection and ethics, in using such data. User-generated big data from social media, web searches, and website visits constitute another promising data source as it is often publicly available in real time and has low usage barriers. Due to the emergence of new platform-based business models in the travel and tourism sector, special attention should be paid to improving access and usage of data on sharing and collaborative economy.

Keywords: cultural tourism; impact assessment; data analytics; mobile positioning data; social media data; web traffic data; online travel reviews; sharing economy; passenger data; innovation barriers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/18/7470/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/18/7470/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:18:p:7470-:d:411878

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().