APIS for accessing and downloading tourism data

Spain was the second country in the world that received the most tourists during 2019, with 83.8 million visitors. That year, tourism activity represented 12.4% of GDP, employing more than 2.2 million people (12.7% of the total). It is therefore a fundamental sector for our economy.

These figures have been reduced due to the pandemic, but the sector is expected to recover in the coming months. Open data can help. Up-to-date information can bring benefits to all actors involved in this industry:

• Tourists: Open data helps tourists plan their trips, providing them with the information they need to choose where to stay or what activities to do. The up-to-date information that open data can provide is particularly important in times of COVID. There are several portals that collect information and visualisations of travel restrictions, such as the UN's Humanitarian Data Exchange. This website hosts a daily updated interactive map of travel restrictions by country and airline.
• Businesses. Businesses can generate various applications targeted at travellers, with useful information. In addition, by analysing the data, tourism establishments can detect untapped markets and destinations. They can also personalise their offers and even create recommendation systems that help to promote different activities, with a positive impact on the travellers' experience.
• Public administrations. More and more governments are implementing solutions to capture and analyse data from different sources in real time, in order to better understand the behaviour of their visitors. Examples include Segovia, Mallorca and Gran Canaria. Thanks to these tools, they will be able to define strategies and make informed decisions, for example, aimed at avoiding overcrowding. In this sense, tools such as Affluences allow them to report on the occupation of museums, swimming pools and shops in real time, and to obtain predictions for successive time slots.

The benefits of having quality tourism-related data are such that it is not surprising that the Spanish Government has chosen this sector as a priority when it comes to creating data spaces that allow voluntary data sharing between organisations. In this way, data from different sources can be cross-referenced, enriching the various use cases.

The data used in this field are very diverse: data on consumption, transport, cultural activities, economic trends or even weather forecasts. But in order to make good use of this highly dynamic data, it needs to be available to users in appropriate, up-to-date formats and access needs to be automated through application programming interfaces (APIs).

Many organisations already offer data through APIs. In this infographic you can see several examples linked to our country at national, regional and local level. But in addition to general data portals, we can also find APIs in open data platforms linked exclusively to the tourism sector. In the following infographic you can see several examples:

Click here to see the infographic in full size and in its accessible version.

Do you know more examples of APIs or other resources that facilitate access to tourism-related open data? Leave us a comment or write to datos.gob.es!

Content prepared by the datos.gob.es team.