Detection of high impact tourist events in Piemonte region, Italy

Tourism is a complex and highly competitive sector. In Italy, public institutions play a crucial role in supporting events that can increase tourism flows. The current world economic crisis makes even more necessary than in the past to adopt an informed decision making process for resource allocation. The statistical methodology that is described in this paper analyses daily tourism flows in Piemonte as collected by the Italian National Institute of Statistics, ISTAT, under the ‘Occupancy in collective accommodation establishments” census. The days of the year in which the registered bednights are expected to be strongly correlated with events like public holidays, commercial fairs and sport competitions are identified. A fully unsupervised methodology for Piemonte Region (Italy) tourism events detection has been developed and implemented using SAS Forecast Server. The methodology can be transferred, without any modification, to any of the 20 Italian Regions.