Improving Tourism Diffusion in Tuscany

Fellows: Kaushik Mohan, Bruno Del Papa, Orsolya Vasarhelyi, Yanbing Wang
Data Science Mentor(s): Qiwei Han, Nuno BrĂ¡s
Project Manager: Gabriele Simeone
Project Partner: Toscana Promozione Turistica

Tuscany, with Florence at its heart, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. With a population of about 4 million people, it welcomes every year tourists for almost 90 million nights. This number has been growing over the last decade and putting the region, its infrastructure and its inhabitants under extreme pressure. Partnering with Toscana Promozione Turistica, DSSG fellows are working on studying the mobility patterns of tourists in Tuscany, to identify the different types of tourists visiting Tuscany: the city-hoppers, who concentrate their trips in major cities; the coast-lovers, who spend most time along the coast; the explorers, who visit both the coast and inland cities and attractions; and the countrysiders, who concentrate their trips along the eastern border of Tuscany and likely traveled by car.

By extracting features from the data and using machine-learning algorithms to group individuals, we hope to help the partner identify and understand better the people visiting the region. Using this information, the partner can market the whole region better and improving tourist diffusion throughout the whole region as compared to highly concentrated towns right now. We hope to achieve this by extracting features from the trajectories and cluster the data using machine-learning algorithms.