This case study explores the TravelBI data hub in Portugal. The data hub brings together a relevant set of data and market research about the tourism sector in a single platform. It is powered by a business intelligence system and allows access to several data sources. TravelBI has more than 73 000 active users and 380 000 pageviews per year, covering 28 international markets, with more than 20 themes and specific chapters on sustainability indicators. It has become a laboratory for exploring alternative data sources, including big data sources, for tourism management.
The Portugal TravelBI Data hub
Abstract
Turismo de Portugal developed TravelBI in 2016, a data hub for the Portuguese tourism sector, which brings together in a single platform a relevant set of data and market research about the tourism sector. The data hub is powered by a business intelligence system and allows access to several data sources, covering more than 20 tourism themes. The outputs and data developed in this context are made available to the public on TravelBI by Turismo de Portugal.
The approval of the Tourism Strategy 2027, with specific objectives in each of the three pillars of sustainability, boosted the importance of this data hub which, in addition to regular information on the performance of the tourism sector, expanded the scope of data for decision making in the sector and the use of new indicators and alternative data sources, to support the development of the strategy in all its phases.
The objectives of TravelBI by Turismo de Portugal were to integrate relevant tourism data sources into a single platform, explore new sources of data to promote data-driven management and innovation, and to address tourism sustainability challenges faced by destinations and tourism companies. TravelBI has more than 73 000 active users and 380 000 pageviews per year, covering 28 international markets, with more than 20 themes and specific chapters on sustainability indicators. It has become a laboratory for exploring alternative data sources, including big data sources, for tourism management.
The development of TravelBI was financed through Turismo de Portugal and with EU funds through the Recovery and Resilience Plan. European funds are used to develop new features in TravelBI or test new data sources, while the funds for its maintenance primary are from the Turismo de Portugal budget.The development of TravelBI required investment and learning. The implementation itself took roughly a year but requires ongoing adjustments to adopt new features, new data and new ways of sharing information. As such, the data hub is a dynamic system. The annual costs associated with TravelBI, including active licenses for the different systems, are approximately EUR 600 000, of which around 70% are associated with data sources.
In addition to providing official statistics and research from Turismo de Portugal, the project includes the exploration and dissemination of a total of 30 different alternative data sources (including airline, transaction, mobile positioning, and short-term rental data). In some cases, Turismo de Portugal have access to microdata, such as airport data and official data. The data are loaded into a data warehouse, with mechanisms to allow data confidentiality, either through direct queries within the data warehouse itself or through queries within dashboards to ensure that data identified as confidential is not shared.
The alternative data sources work as complementary information to official data from the tourism statistics system. As it is business information with higher granularity and a higher frequency than official statistics, it allows the provision of rich and timely insights for decision-making by tourism stakeholders:
Flights data are used to monitor air capacity and demand, from a third party, which is used together with airport data. This is an important source of information, given the importance of connectivity for Portugal as a destination, and it is seen as the source that best allows the anticipation of future market trends.
Transaction data allows Turismo de Portugal to better understand average expenses by sector of activity, region and market of origin. This can be a useful complement to the data on tourism receipts from Banco de Portugal, providing additional granularity for the expense type and geography.
Mobile positioning data and reviews data from third-party data providers were used to study mobility patterns of tourists in the territory for specific events and to understand guest reviews. A feasibility study used mobile positioning data, private accommodation data and a social media crawler to study the tourism pressure in Lisbon, with the objective to support Turismo de Portugal and local authorities to understand and measure tourism flows to explore and design solutions for sustainable tourism in Lisbon.
Geodata from SiGTUR provides insights on the territorial distribution of supply, and the pipeline of new development plans and projects, which can facilitate analyses for investment decisions. Users can download the data through open data in different formats including shapefile, csv, KML, and GeoJSON.
In addition to the new data sources, Turismo de Portugal have been developing new projects to collect information from companies on environmental performance, ESG performance and are planning to collect information on digital maturity.
An important challenge, especially when working with new data sources, is securing the relevant knowledge and skills to work with the different technologies and data sources, and to ensure the data literacy of the end users. Significant human resources and skills are needed to maintain the technological systems behind TravelBI. Ongoing training is relevant to keep up to date with current developments.
The costs associated with data purchasing and processing can be a challenge, especially when working with large volumes of data. Renewing contracts with data suppliers can be associated with significant costs. A well-planned budget can facilitate continuous data access.
A final challenge is how to display the information in the data hub. A data warehouse in Microsoft Azure feeds the data hub through Azure Data Factory, where several ETL (Extraction, Transformation, and Load) have been developed to load data from different sources. Three different technologies are used to display the data (Qlik Sense, Microsoft PowerBI and ArcGIS):
Qlik Sense is used to explore data internally and create tables in a quick and intuitive way to respond to urgent requests.
Microsoft PowerBI is used to make data publicly available through TravelBI, as this facilitates sharing and does not require specific licenses to access.
ArcGIS technology used to display geographic data, for example the territorial distribution of supply and demand data.
Turismo de Portugal is developing a new, more dynamic, version of the portal, with new integrations and technological improvements, new areas available, and with access to private data via API. A new data analysis tool will allow users to visualise and analyse data quickly and easily, allowing the intuitive and simple design of pivot tables, while an area for co-creation, developed within the scope of the UN Tourism INSTO network, will facilitate collaboration with research centres and the network of regional sustainable tourism observatories, as well as sharing specific information with teams abroad.
For further information please contact:
Patricia Seguro, Head of Unit, Portugal National Tourism Authority, patricia.seguro@turismodeportugal.pt
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