New exclusive map will show places most visited by foreign tourists in Lithuania
Where do tourists visiting Lithuania go during the day, how do they travel, how long do they stay in a particular place? This data, which is of great interest to the country and the tourism industry, will now be available on a new online tourist mobility map. This innovation should bring significant changes to Lithuania's tourism sector, helping to improve services for tourists and help businesses find new customers and sources of income.
The Lithuanian Tourism Promotion Agency “Keliauk Lietuvoje” (English: Lithuania Travel ) has introduced an innovation - a pilot tourist mobility monitoring project. It will now be much easier to assess the data of foreign tourists travelling in Lithuania based on depersonalized mobile data.
"We are developing a unique model that will allow businesses to expand and operate in places visited by foreign tourists. We hope that the more advanced system we have developed and the results will be successfully used to improve the experience of foreign tourists when they visit our country. It will also stimulate investment in new services and contribute to the improvement of tourism infrastructure," said Aušrinė Armonaitė, the Minister of Economy and Innovation.
Detailed tourist travel data will be available on an interactive map that requires no special software or knowledge to use. The map will help to effectively monitor trends and behavior of foreign tourists in the country.
According to Olga Goncharova, Acting Director of the agency " Lithuania Travel ", the new data will help businesses to forecast tourist flows and identify places where tourists are more likely to visit. This information will also be relevant for municipalities and tourist service institutions, as they will be able to quickly find out not only information about tourist flows, but also the countries which people come from to a certain place most often, and to better prepare for that.
The map will be based on the data of foreign tourists travelling in Lithuania provided by the mobile operator Tele2. According to Gediminas Jankauskas, Data Scientist and Project Manager at Tele2, mobile phones are constantly exchanging information with the nearest communication towers, so the assessment of this information will allow to calculate quite accurately the number of people having connected to towers in a specific location.
Untapped tourism potential
Mantas Butrimavičius, CEO of Positin, the company that provided technical implementation of the project, says that no common system for counting or monitoring foreign tourists has been developed in our country so far, and that mobile operators are able to provide fairly accurate data. He said that the data shows that most of these people use main roads to travel in the country and rarely visit the nearby sites of attraction. Thus, tourism has not yet exploited its potential to divert these transit visitors to adjacent tourism facilities, but a clearer signage and road signs, outdoor advertising, catering, accommodation, shopping and entertainment establishments can make targeted changes to improve this situation in the future.
The map currently shows data for May-October 2021. In the future, the data will be updated in real time and will reach users with a minimum delay of a week or two, which is much faster than the current statistics from accommodation places.
“We are taking the innovation-based path and believe in the benefits it brings. We will soon be able to showcase the trends in our country,” says O. Goncharova.