The Costa del Sol Tourist Board gave a training activity on ‘big data’ (data intelligence) to entrepreneurs in the sector on Thursday 17th, in Mijas. This tool allows us to collect data and information about tourists and visitors who choose our destination for their holidays and provides information on their consumption, needs, tastes and preferences that allows entrepreneurs and administrations to adapt the current offer to the real demand. This is the Big Data Tourist Costa del Sol initiative, an innovative tourism intelligence tool. One of the most interesting details released during the conference at the Town Hall is that the municipality if there is no new COVID-19 wave, will recover in this high season the numbers before the pandemic in this area.
“The prospect for this summer is that it will be as similar as possible to 2019 and even better. And along these lines, we are hosting a meeting where the City Council and private sector companies are getting up to date with an avant-garde tool that is fundamental in the tourism sector, big data. Framed within our Strategic Tourism Plan, this tool allows us to collect information on what tourists are looking for, not guided by intuition, but by reliable data. That will allow us to refine our tourist offer,” said the Mijas Councillor, Josele González (PSOE), who stressed that tourists “are increasingly looking for more specific experiences, segmented, almost a la carte. It is very 80’s to base tourism only on the sun and beach. We are talking about a tourist who seeks genuine experiences, in contact with nature, sport, gastronomy and culture. Precisely, the big data will enable us to hit much more in campaigns and tourism marketing strategy that we can develop, both from the City Council and from private companies.
In this sense, the First Deputy Mayor and Councillor for Tourism, José Carlos Martín (Cs), added that Mijas has been one of the pioneering municipalities in Malaga in using ‘big data in this sector, as the Department was working in this area prior the pandemic. “We are talking about data that is different to those that have been used for years, as they are more reliable and immediate. Thus, we can know in real-time who is interested in coming to the municipality, from where in the world, what their level of spending is, their leisure and gastronomic preferences, the biggest potential issuing country, among others. All these profiles will help us to adapt the offer as well as to plan as we know in advance, how many tourists are going to come from a specific point in the next three or six months. This way, both businessmen and the City Council can organise the resources,” said the Tourism Councillor. Focusing the offers
In short, thanks to the analysis of all the information they provide through their online searches and management, both entrepreneurs and administrations can focus their offer on sectors, segments and tourist packages.

 

Tourism reference 
Both local and provincial authorities are very confident that the tourism sector will recover quickly and hope that during the coming Easter and summer the figures of the best times of the Costa del Sol and, of course, of Mijas, will be recovered. According to the head of the Tourist Intelligence Department of the Costa del Sol Tourist Board, Rafael Fuentes, “ Mijas is one of the jewels in the crown of the province of Malaga and Andalusia. Mijas is much more in demand, it is the reference for many other markets.  Emerging countries and with higher spending trends, which is what we are most interested in, such as Korean or Japanese are interested in Mijas. It is very well positioned, it is doing things very well in terms of marketing and promotion. They always cooperate to the maximum. And I’m sure that if the pandemic evolves well it will return to the figures of 2019, the best year for tourism on the Costa del Sol”.

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