Developed in response to a ‘wish list’ of requirements expressed by the directors of tourist destinations, the Mobility Insights solution provides enhanced insight into the volume and characteristics of the tourism flows generated around a region. This solution is the result of a collaboration between Swisscom and HES-SO Valais-Wallis, which is responsible for developing the Valais Tourism Observatory, now better known by the name Tourobs. Tourobs is based at the Swiss Digital Center in Sierre.
For several years, Tourobs has demonstrated its ability to produce contextualised analyses that draw on an extremely diverse data set collected from both official sources and panels representing the different tourism sectors. In collaboration with Swisscom, Tourobs is set to significantly improve the support given to destination management organisations (DMOs).
The partnership contract signed between Swisscom and HES-SO Valais-Wallis gives Tourobs the right to provide DMOs all over Switzerland with access to control panels displaying graphical information generated from data collected from mobile phone SIM cards.
This graphical information is of course anonymised and aggregated so that it can only be identified in terms of grouped values. No individual conclusions can be drawn from it and it cannot be used to create individual movement profiles. In this way, all the legal requirements governing data protection and ethical principles are fully respected, while at the same time providing precise information on numbers of bed-nights and visitors and the time spent by visitors in a given region.
