Tourism: A rapidly changing sector
The French tourism sector faces a significant challenge: how to use data more effectively to adjust marketing plans, ensure reliable investment projects, and better manage the benefits produced, especially when statistics are varied, not sufficiently responsive, and often hard to access for its players? With the sector’s strong recovery, a better understanding of clients and flow is crucial, just as stakeholders increasingly demand accurate measurement of the economic, social, and environmental impacts of tourism. However, the industry struggles to fully harness its data’s potential. This observation raises vital issues for the sector’s sovereignty and strategic autonomy. Without data sharing between public and private tourism stakeholders, not only would a vital management and competitiveness tool be lost, but other entities with interests diverging from the common good and France’s tourist development could benefit.
Data as the new sector driver
In line with European data sharing recommendations and spurred by public authorities, Atout France (the State Operator responsible for promoting French tourism, with over 1100 members) launched the “France Tourisme Observation” platform in 2021. This platform aims to make the sector’s data management autonomous, offering a trustworthy framework where all partners, both public and private, can submit and access datasets and analyses in various formats for public interest purposes. These data encompass understanding consumer behaviors, predicting attendance, assessing economic, social, and environmental impacts, and monitoring the sector’s ecological transition. The goal is to have a tool addressing both immediate data and more structural, forward-looking data to guide sustainable transformation and implement the Destination France Plan. The swift platform deployment relies on an entirely French sovereign technology, Cleyrop, ensuring data security and trustworthiness. Founded in 2020, the company aims to democratize and unlock data usage for both public and private organizations, adhering to European regulations and values.
Towards initial results
In 2021, a pioneering use case emerged: a real-time attendance and reservation barometer for open-air hotels in France, in collaboration with FNHPA and ADN Tourisme. This innovation allows camping professionals to automatically transmit their attendance indicators (actuals and reservations) from their digital sales tools, fundamentally changing sector knowledge. Data from nearly 1500 campsites are, of course, anonymized to respect business confidentiality. This year, Atout France and Cleyrop collaborated to participate in a contest organized by BPI France, a partnership that won an award under the “TechSprint for the Green Tourism Target.” The award will facilitate a new tool’s creation for measuring and simulating tourism stakeholders’ resource consumption on the France Tourisme Observation platform, in partnership with Enedis and Suez.
“For us, the France Tourisme Observation project perfectly embodies Cleyrop’s philosophy. We are passionate about transforming the French tourism industry through data to enhance its attractiveness and develop newer, more responsible models, alongside Atout France. We offer maximum security within a European framework that respects personal data. We are thrilled to be fully involved in this large-scale project to transform the French tourism industry!” emphasizes Stéphane Messika, Cleyrop co-founder.”
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