Challenge & Context

As we all know, every Smart City has its own, unique problems. Some Smart Cities have so much tourist activity that it affects every service for visitors and locals alike. These Smart Cities, or as we call them, Smart Destinations, need to track how this tourism affects their city. What are their touristic resources? What do visitors think of the destination? What is offered to tourists before, during, and after their visit? Tracking this is easier said than done, as most IoT solutions don’t generate sufficient objective data to answer these questions. A Smart Destination needs to use the opinions of its visitors as one of its main data sources.

This situation poses some challenges. First, the tourism sector has always been far behind in terms of digitalization. Second, even when we can use digital solutions for data, there are way too many complex sources, including social networks, private booking engines, mobile applications, and open data. In the best-case scenario, we get objective data: number of reservations, nationality of the visitors, average spending, etc. However, most of these sources require additional intelligence in order to be easily exploitable, like seasonal and touristic event awareness, comparative metrics between different social networks, and text opinions.

Most Smart Destinations do not simply want to attract more visitors. They also often want to adjust their flow of visitors seasonally. For example, most beach destinations want more visitors throughout the year, not just in the summer. Maintaining sustainable tourism is important for both the environment and local citizens. It is also important to captivate visitors so they repeat their travels in the future and use the data collected to instruct local businesses.

The main challenge of Smart Destinations is using IoT solutions and other digital platforms to generate useful metric data that can improve their overall competitiveness and sustainability , even when their data sources are not objective.

Figure 1 . Dashboard (1)

BARET allows destinations, regions, and companies in the tourism sector to access the data they need to design their strategies for the future and to measure the true impact of their actions while engaging with tourists.

What are the main benefits of the platform ?

• The platform measures in real-time the flows and volumes of people who visit facilities or use travel routes and compares them with the impact of marketing campaigns and other actions aimed at strengthening the destination brand;
• It analyzes the topics that potential customers and users are talking about in real-time, to design content marketing strategies based on their interests.
• It actively listens to potential tourists and uses the information to compare trends with the real evolution of allocations and business volume. This makes it easy to understand the target market and its alignment;
• It helps conduct impact analysis on investments and sponsorships, obtains intelligent recommendations for the future, and provides conclusions about their performance and efficiency;
• It performs valuable semantic analysis to analyze the overall sentiment of publications and detect context via keywords.

All of these functionalities are converted to graphical and easily understandable data, which is presented in real-time dashboards. This data is also sent in reports to end users like public institutions, city halls, and the destination’s touristic agents. For each report, BARET gathers all the information, performs several analyses on it, and displays the results. Purple Blob integrates the Smart Destination’s tourism industry via a digitalization process:

• It works with the Smart Destination to generate a clear and consistent strategy.
• It works with local businesses that are directly related to tourism, and digitalizes the offer of these businesses so they can improve their visibility on the internet and be tracked on BARET.
• It creates a digital marketing plan based on the touristic offer that is available at the Smart Destination. It then links social networks and websites with BARET to closely monitor the impact of the digital marketing campaigns that guide the plan.
• It monitors the impact of these campaigns. It’s often difficult to find accurate results on social networks and websites, but thanks to IoT solutions such as PIR sensors and booking services, we can see exactly how many new visitors actually visit the object of the campaigns.
• Lastly, with all this new information, agents can modulate their offer around the true impact, interests, and opinions of their visitors.

These tourism operators can also create more in-depth reports based on the data collected by BARET.

Figure 2 . Dashboard (2)

Figure 3 . Analytics (1)

Figure 4 . Analytics (2)

Benefits & Impact

The benefits of BARET implementation are noticeable after just one year of use. The destinations and brands that have adopted BARET have already started to control their marketing campaigns in an intensive way. This has led them to unique action paths, such as the modification of clauses in sponsorship contracts to obtain more mentions in the social media accounts of their sponsored teams and organizations.

BARET was developed in 2021. It onboarded its first clients in regions such as Huesca, where its implementation is already transforming the region’s touristic fabric and repurposing almost 50% of the marketing budget. The listing in Segittur’s Catalogue of Technological Solutions has led to a country-wide impact, and more users are expected to begin implementing BARET in Spain, especially in areas where cross-regional projects and data sharing is expected.

Interest in BARET has not been limited to Spain. Some LATAM countries have also expressed an interest in the solution. An adaptation of their data could deeply benefit the already booming touristic regions.

BARET is currently being used by 3 different organisations, with more than 50 specialised users. It hosts about 16 million different entries from social networks, websites, and IoT solutions. This number is growing continuously and adds over 50,000 unique entries every day. It’s also anticipated to grow exponentially this year, as it is expected to double the size of the platform.

FIWARE enables the further integration of tools for the Smart Destination, allowing the solution to scale without the need for further development. For instance, Smart Destinations can develop predictive models based on the data acquired in the first phase of the implementation by adding a new module that gets fed data directly from Orion Context Broker.

FIWARE also makes it easy to implement Smart Data Models with the currently deployed schema. This allows BARET to integrate advanced functions to engage in data-sharing projects with other institutions or users.

Additionally, BARET has been presented at international events, trade shows and marketplaces such as

• FITUR 2021
• FIWARE Marketplace
• FIWARE Smart Fest 2021
• As a Certified Innovation Case in the 2i Programme by the Basque Government.

Beret is one of the products included in FIWARE Marketplace.

Added value through FIWARE

BARET was not developed from scratch. It was, in fact, built with several open- source components. In this regard, the most important FIWARE components are Orion Context Broker, the IoT Agent (IoTA) library, and QuantumLeap. The combination of Orion and QuantumLeap allows us to ingest large quantities of data from both open data portals and social networks. This data always maintains a coherent and interoperable semantic thanks to the NGSI standard. We have used the IoTA library to develop social network integrations and for many implementations based mostly on REST API services to automate data collection and translation.

The result is a secure, robust, and efficient architecture. BARET is also compatible with other IoT Agents and can integrate new IoT solutions easily. Thanks to this flexibility, we can offer a Smart Destination product that can also cover the needs of any other Smart City. For example, with the right IoT Agents, BARET can monitor energy usage, waste management, or the efficiency of transportation.

Additionally, through the use of these components, regions that implement the platform are able to share common Data Spaces through the use of standardized models, allowing for cross-regional intelligence and common projects.

To summarize, FIWARE adds important value to the platform via:

• Interoperability of the data, thanks to the NGSI standard.
• Adaptability to tourism as well as other Smart City concerns, thanks to the IoTA architecture.
• Overall efficiency and quality, thanks to ORION and QuantumLeap.

Quick development of new data sources, thanks to the IoTA library.