Real-time data, an asset for decision-making

Visitor numbers provide invaluable information for managing an area or site. It enables a fact-based analysis of the actions taken to measure their effectiveness, communicate with the public, and justify decisions. Obtaining this data in real time provides an additional level of responsiveness.

On this subject, the tourism organization Visit Skåne AB (in the Swedish province of Skåne) has been monitoring visitor numbers in real time at its seven car parks providing access to natural and tourist areas since June 2024. The counters were installed with our partner in Sweden Amparo Solutions.

ZELT ^Evo vehicle counters (powered by solar panels) are installed at the entrances to the car parks to monitor visitor numbers and share the data in real time with a dedicated website: Uncrowded.se. This keeps visitors informed of visitor numbers, helps them to spread their visits more evenly over time, and avoids saturation of tourist sites, which is a source of damage to flora and fauna.

Example of a real-time indicator available on the “Uncrowded” site for the car park to the Ale Megaliths site.

“The Uncrowded service was developed by Visit Skåne with a goal of innovation and developing a sustainable destination. At the moment, there are no tools that can both make information accessible and prevent visitors from putting too much pressure on nature. There is great interest in finding solutions to balance visitor flows,” says Hélène Östberg, Brand and Innovation Manager at Visit Skåne AB.

Advantages: reliable, real visitor data from the field.

Disadvantages: even in real time, reactions can only be made after the event. The solution also requires a high level of reliability in terms of counting and the data transmission chain in order to be usable.

Solutions: The Public Webpage and the API, two tools for communicating with the public about visitor numbers

In the project above, the data was transmitted directly to a website that relayed the data.

Among the tools available for communicating this data, the Public Webpage also lets managers transmit visitor information easily, each following day, with a turnkey tool.

Sharing the data via a client API also means that any type of web tool can be built to communicate with the general public and share data more regularly. Thanks to this data access system, it is possible to build a public dashboard indicating the level of traffic on a site.

Predicting visitor numbers, the other side of data-driven management

Real-time data can certainly be a very useful tool for day-to-day management. But it has one main limitation: it only allows you to be reactive.

On the other hand, predicting data over time brings the advantages of being able to proactively plan the resources to be deployed on site:

• Visitor reception
• Safety/fire procedures
• Supplies and staff

Predicting visitor numbers also makes it possible to communicate further in advance in order to spread out visits, either temporally or spatially (on this subject, see our article on managing peak visitor numbers).

All in all, this type of information is likely to improve the visitor experience, often with a positive sense of anticipation.

Our Data team is currently working on the possibility of providing (estimated daily traffic) attendance figures for the next week. To predict footfall, we are training a series of machine learning models on a dataset that includes historical data from a counting site, combined with external variables such as weather conditions and annual events (public holidays) based on peer-reviewed research.

We have identified these factors as relevant for predicting pedestrian, cyclist and vehicle use (for car park access to natural sites).

Prediction of visitor numbers made by our Data team.

This makes it possible to anticipate visitor levels to your tourist site.

Advantages: better anticipation and preparation.

Disadvantages: you need to take into account the various parameters that can affect visitor numbers and use robust statistical models.

Are you interested in this solution? Talk to us about your needs!

Eco-Counter guarantees

Aware of the limits of both real time data and prediction, here’s what we’ve put in place in our solutions to guarantee the best possible monitoring of visitor numbers:

Real-time data

• Reliability of transmission systems: constant monitoring of data transmissions and data access servers.
• 95% service availability guaranteed by our service providers (hosting & transmission).
• Twenty-strong customer support team, based in France and Canada, to provide rapid answers to all technical questions.

Prediction

• Dedicated data analysis team of ten data science and geo data science engineers.
• Analysis and prediction algorithms based on the largest pedestrian/cycle count database in the world, with more than 15,000 systems installed in 57 countries (various urban and natural environments, different weather conditions).
• Integration of multiple Machine Learning models automatically associating a consistent statistical weight to each variable.