Tourism flow refers to the spatial patterns of tourists visiting a city. It is an essential aspect of tourism management and provides information that is important in managing tourism and providing services and goods. A tourism system can be defined as a framework that shows the interaction between tourism supply at the destination, the bridging elements between supply and demand, and the tourist generating regions. Leipers Tourism System is a widely used model that depicts tourism as a system involving the discretionary travel and temporary stay of persons away from their usual place of residence for one or more nights. The elements of the system are tourists, generating regions, transit routes, destination regions, and a tourist industry. These five elements are arranged in spatial and functional connections.
Tourism 4.0 is a new concept that aims to enable GDPR compliant advanced analyses and forecasts of tourist movements based on anonymized data from a multitude of different sources. FLOWS is one of the four pillars of Tourism 4.0, which will enable the collection of real-time data on visits to popular destinations to support the understanding of visits in the Alpine area. The FLOWS system will display traffic flows and complement the solutions of other providers, such as itineraries, reservation systems, and revenue management systems. With FLOWS, tourism providers, destination managers, and researchers can better understand and manage person flows in overcrowded periods as well as lock-down time to maybe allow partial mobility of travelers to desired zones.
In summary, tourism flow refers to the spatial patterns of tourists visiting a city, and it is an essential aspect of tourism management. Leipers Tourism System is a widely used model that depicts tourism as a system involving the discretionary travel and temporary stay of persons away from their usual place of residence for one or more nights. Tourism 4.0 is a new concept that aims to enable advanced analyses and forecasts of tourist movements based on anonymized data from a multitude of different sources, and FLOWS is one of the four pillars of Tourism 4.0 that will enable the collection of real-time data on visits to popular destinations to support the understanding of visits in the Alpine area.
