Marketing. For a long time, tourist offices have worked on intuition. Now, they sometimes see the wave of visitors to a festival, concert or exhibition rise several weeks in advance. To achieve this, the G2A Consulting firm cross-references accommodation reservation data and mobile phone flows using Orange’s Flux Vision tool. Where the old methods relied on surveys carried out after the fact, G2A now relies on data captured upstream, directly in the reservation systems of local accommodation providers, hotels, campsites, tourist residences and rental platforms such as Airbnb. The flows are aggregated over time and will measure a peak of activity weeks in advance.
This monitoring makes it possible to adjust decisions even before visitors arrive. The data is used to estimate occupancy rates but also to refine certain pricing policies, particularly for events or cultural facilities. In the most sensitive cases, such as the cancellation of an event, these projections are cross-referenced with the expenses recorded by merchants via payment terminals. “This allows us to calculate the loss to the local economy and compare it to the cost that the event represents for the city,” summarizes Denis Maurer, president of G2A.
Attendance indicators
To monitor day trippers, these day visitors who do not sleep there, G2A relies on a partnership with Orange. The operator’s Flux Vision observation tool relies on signals emitted by cell phones when they connect to cell towers. This mobility data is then aggregated and anonymized before being used in order to comply with privacy protection rules. In short, they allow us to know how many people are present in a territory at a given time, where they come from and how they move. And thus produce overall attendance indicators. Orange then applies a statistical adjustment based on its market share in order to estimate the total population actually present on a site. From these flows, G2A reconstructs the origin of visitors by observing the usual connection areas of telephone SIM cards. A system that allows you to tell how many visitors came to the event and from which country or region of France they come.
Such engineering comes at a price. For a tourist office, access to G2A dashboards generally ranges between 10,000 euros and 25,000 euros per year depending on the volume of beds monitored. Impact studies based on mobile telephony, via the Orange tool, add between 3,000 euros and 8,000 euros per major event. An investment assumed to objectify choices financed by public money.
