Informal tourist accommodation, Airbnb and much more, in Wallonia : an approach via mobile telephony data

Tourism is undergoing major changes because of the volume of innovations that are intended for it. Approached as a vector of development, tourism sets off many questions as to how it is redesigned and decided. The sharing economy is part of these innovations.
This research focuses on the implications of the sharing economy for tourism and destinations. While several researches highlight the economic and social impacts related to the “new” accommodation, the knowledge of the distribution of overnight stays is currently falsified because national organisms fail to consider the huge diversity of less formal accommodation.
Wallonia, as case study, allows to analyse informal tourist accommodation in small and medium cities as well as in rural areas that are, or are not, considered as tourist destinations. To understand the influences of the development of “new” accommodation on host communities, a first step consists in studying their location and spatial expansion schemes using data from mobile telephony and to conceptualize and give the green light to the data. The second step is to consult databases relating to exchange platforms as well as official statistics of tourism. These data are compared with the location data from mobile telephony.
In accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations and technological limits, we developed with the mobile operator, Proximus, the definitions required to generate the algorithm to obtain tourists’ overnight stays and arrivals data. It results that tourist overnight stays would be 3 to 4 times more numerous than what is reported in official statistics and that the distributions are localised throughout Wallonia.
The paper presents and discusses the methodology used to analyse tourist accommodation from mobile data and the results from the comparison with official and exchange platforms databases.