Statistical monitoring of tourism in the knowledge era

Statistical monitoring of tourism refers to a territory where data are collected regularly allowing for space and/or time comparisons and benchmarking analysis. In knowledge era, data can be easy and cheap, information may be available real time, knowledge discovery from different sources of information for decision and accurate prediction can be rather complex and costly without a statistical information system. This paper introduces the knowledge discovey process and the statistical learning paradigm yielding to buil up a conceptual model for a Digital Accessible Statistical Information System for Monitoring of Tourism (DASISMT). Statistical methods for monitoring of tourism are described to answer specific questions: to provide a summary view of the tendency of tourism demand and supply using official data; to support revenue management in benchmarking and yield analysis using private data from hotel informative systems as well as sharing data systems; to analyse the incoming and tourist satisfaction by identifying the consensus ranking on the prioritary actions to improve the tourist supply using data from direct surveys; to identify the market segmentation and the brand value or sentiment using web data. Nowadays, this represents a necessity condition for all players, inside and outside the production chain, to be adequate to the international competitiveness and for increasing the “value of a territory” as an integrated touristic destination system.