Provincial Council presents the Hodeian project

This past 30 July, a press conference was held in the building of the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa (https://www.gipuzkoa.eus/eu/hasiera) to present the Hodeian project.

This is a pioneering pilot project to study “Big Data” on tourism in Gipuzkoa with the collaboration of Tecnalia (https://www.tecnalia.com/en/) and Dinycon Sistemas (https://www.dinycon.com/).

This project will be active until the end of this year and aims to analyse consumer habits and gain a better understanding of the profile of visitors to the province of Gipuzkoa. The reason why it will remain active until the end of the year is because the aim is to find out about the movement of visitors at different times of the year, each with its own particularities.

The ultimate aim of this project is to be able to create more precise tourism policies and “promote a more sustainable, intelligent and efficient tourism”, according to Denis Itxaso, deputy for Culture and Tourism, in order to offer a better experience to the visitor.

The Dinycon contribution to this project is the application of the counting and tracking solution. While counting has been installed in the Territorial Tourist Offices on the Boulevard Donostia and in Getaria, the tracking solution is in Pasajes San Juan, in the Albaola shipyard in Pasajes San Pedro (http://www.albaola.com/en/), in the Balenciaga Museum (http://www.cristobalbalenciagamuseoa.com/en/) in Getaria and in the Basilica of San Ignacio de Loiola (https://www.santuariodeloyola.org/en/) in Azpeitia.

The results presented at the press conference are for the period from January to June and indicate that the historical territory of Gipuzkoa welcomes a very varied public.

It should be remembered that all this data is protected by the new GDPR and is completely anonymous: the identity of the users is unknown.

Thanks to this collection of data on bank transactions, it has been found that French tourists spend the most in Gipuzkoa (41%), -followed by American tourists with 15%, Germans with 9% and the United Kingdom with 5%-. In spite of this, the tourist with the highest average daily expenditure is from the USA with 138.30€ per day (Germany 129.40€, UK 109.20€), compared to 44.30€ for the French. From the combination of these data, we can deduce that the French tourist is a day tourist: the difference in amount is due to the fact that the US tourist spends the night in the territory, whereas the French tourist does not.

By autonomous communities, the tourist who spends the most is from Madrid (21%), followed by Catalonia (20%) and in third place is the tourist from Navarre (11%).

A curious fact offered by this data analysis is that foreign visitors make most of their purchases between 14:00 and 16:00 hours, while only 8% of tourists from the state do so in that time slot.

By sector, accommodation accounts for the most expenditure (34%), followed by restaurants (24%) and fashion and footwear (13%).

It remains to be seen how these data vary in the second half of the year, as these trends are expected to vary during this period for various reasons (summer, La Concha regatta flag, San Sebastian Film Festival, San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival).