Simón Tur (Ibiza, 1974) is the new coordinator of the Tourism Intelligence System of the island of Ibiza. This data guru says, in an interview with La Voz de Ibiza, that “my job is a challenge. With many aspects, very transversal, which not only affects the tourism sector, because when you start to pull the thread enters mobility, enters the environment, etc. and many things come out. I would never have thought that I would end up in this job, but the reality is that it seems that all the steps I have taken in my life were aimed at ending up in this place”. And the passion with which he talks about it corroborates this.
The steps he refers to are studies in Tourism, postgraduate studies in Marketing and Communication, continuous training, “either you study every day for a little while or you die”, work for 20 years at Betacar when it was owned by Palau y Colomar and then Europcar, fluent in German, English, French, Italian and of course Spanish and Catalan. 20 years at Betacar when it was owned by Palau and Colomar and later Europcar, fluent in German, English, French, Italian and, of course, Spanish and Catalan.
“At Betacar, we went from a family model to being bought by a multinational that controlled every last euro. From there, I jumped to another company that signed me, where we started working with Google Analytics. By the time I realized it, I was already handling twice my annual gross salary in Google Ads alone. One thing led to another and I dove into data analytics. I started a company with my partner and we’ve been going for 14 years. Among other things, we did SEO, websites. My partner developed applications, and so on,” he says.
After collaborating altruistically for three years in charge of the data of the Tourist Association of Ibiza and Formentera, last February she became the head of the tourist observatory of Ibiza.
Today, it is working on the construction of SITE, “a website that will bring together all the public and private data sources to which we subscribe: tourist spending, hotel demand and supply, air connectivity, mobility”. To this end, it has agreements with Mabrian, Master Card, Orange, Amadeus and Smart Up. A firepower never seen before in Ibiza.
-What will differentiate this website from other public websites such as Ibestat and INE?
-The difference with pages like Ibestat and INE is that they tend to focus on the macro. Ibestat, in 80% of the occasions talks about Ibiza and Formentera. INE only talks about the Balearic Islands and if it talks about any municipality in the Balearic Islands, there is no one from Ibiza, at most the capital, and 90% of the hotel beds are in Santa Eulalia, Sant Josep and Sant Antoni. Ours is going to be focused on detail.
-And will all that huge amount of data you buy from Orange, Mabrian, Amadeus, Smart Up also be accessible to the public?
-At the moment we have access to their databases. We are working on how we can download them and incorporate them into our platform. Whether they are public will be a political decision.
-Is there going to be a tool to combine data?
Access to this entire database is intended to allow us to cross-reference them.
-The crossover of data is what actually generates value.
-Right. You generate value and you generate a story. If there is no story, there is no story. If there is no story, there is no answer to the question: what happened? A flat figure doesn’t do us any good. “33%”. Of what? In front of what? For this, the tool we are going to work with this year, a Power BI, which is used by organizations such as the UN and destinations that have leading tourism observatories worldwide, such as Barcelona and New York.
-Together with the president, he gave a preview of the first data analyzed. What has your journey as head of SITE been like from the time you joined until today?
-First I had to learn how the public administration works. You have to learn how that ecosystem works: who is who, who you have to talk to. I don’t speak political language and until a few days ago I didn’t deal with politicians.
From this point on, we had to sort the databases: what was of interest to us, what was no longer of interest to us, and then try to choose, within the budget available, the best option, the most valid one. Then we tried to choose, within the available budget, the best option, the one we considered the most valid. After that, to start working. I like to turn everything upside down, I question everything, I like to ask myself questions. That takes a lot of meetings. Finally, it’s all about numbers, about positioning, technical issues, which often escape you when you are dealing with an Amadeus, a giant that has 90,000 clicks per second and 40% of the world’s traffic of all airline ticket purchase transactions. I have three volumes to learn to handle that tool. I already handle it well and I will handle it better in four months.
By the end of the season we expect to give a very precise drawing.
-What kind of questions have you asked yourself?
-How many cars are there in Ibiza? How many are from here? How many are rentals? Who are we Ibicencos? How many are we? How many are we in summer? How many are we in winter? Where do we work? What do we do? How many cabs are there in Ibiza? How many VTCs? I am a curious guy. I also like to compare with other destinations. We have a lot of things answered already. The day will come when we will go out and tell the story. And, in the meantime, to prepare reports and to pass them on to whom it may concern.
-How many VTCs are circulating in Ibiza?
-You can’t tell… La Voz de Ibiza has published that more than 300…
-Speaking of VTCs, will it be connected to the system that will regulate the entry of vehicles?
-I am informed and we will be connected.
-You have been handling thousands of tourism surveys conducted on the street and by ATEIF. What has surprised you about the data that have been purchased from information sources?
-One that gave me some food for thought is the issue of spending and hotel occupancy. According to MasterCard data, 28% is spent on accommodation, 25% in bars, 15% in nightclubs and 7% in food stores. These data are for foreign tourists in Spain, because MasterCard does not market them for nationals, although it is possible to know the expenses of Spaniards in, for example, France.
-This data was not known?
-No. From this, we learned that British tourists spend 22% in bars and nightclubs. We have always suspected this, but now we know that out of every 100 euros, 25 are spent on pints.
-I am more surprised than the 7% spent on food.
-Germans and French are the biggest food spenders.
-Does that mean that they are the ones who have to hire the most irregular tourist rentals?
-Maybe not, it’s one of the things to come out with at the end of the season. Even so, the Germans are in a lot of trouble, with the economy, they have been on the verge of recession twice, they have a spectacular, not to say dreadful, housing problem.
-Like ours?
-No, because there are two types of economies right now in Europe. One is the industrial one, the northern bloc that is Germany, England, France, which are much more affected than the economies of southern Europe, Italy, Greece, Spain, even Portugal, which are the ones that are receiving tourism. What will happen next year? We can sense things, but it is still early.
-With a focus on illegal tourist rentals, what role can the information you handle play in helping to minimize them?
-We are working on it, but I can’t say anything at the moment.
-When will we see the real power of an instrument that is of undoubted value even though the general public cannot yet see its benefits?
-As in any business, since I come from the private sector, I hope and wish for three years. Before flying you have to run, before running you have to walk. From this point on, I am very clear about where SITE Ibiza has to go and what we intend to get out of all this cross-referencing of data. When all these public sources can be crossed with these private sources that we are hunting, together with the surveys that ATEIF is doing, coordinated by its president Eduardo Manero, this is a workhorse and a very powerful work.
-Do you collaborate with ATEIF?
-We are disengaged but we are in constant communication with Eduardo Manero. They continue to work with surveys and the information will also be for us. They work with agreements with the public sector and the intention is to combine them.
Measuring to improve: Ibiza’s Tourism Intelligence System
-What is the structure of the department now?
-I report directly to the manager of FECOEV(Daniel Marí), the island director of Tourism(Juan Miguel Costa), and the councilor of tourism, who is the president of the Consell.
-Do you have more human resources at your disposal?
I am a one-man army.
-What things have you not been able to do?
-At the moment it’s just me and this is my first year. I have a list of goals that we tackle little by little. Again: to run you have to walk first.
-What is your budget?
-280,000. That’s 2024, 2025, still under discussion.
-There is a phrase, attributed to the renowned British physicist and mathematician William Thomson Kelvin, that says: “Everything can be measured. What is not measured cannot be improved. What is not improved, always degrades”. Is SIT Ibiza the antidote to degradation?
-In this world of analytics is a phrase we use a lot. There are many things we don’t know, and to know them, you either do it internally or you hire professionals. You take those databases, those numbers and you work on them. Then there will be the political or territorial or marketing vision, they are numbers. They say that statistics are the first liar. Then, from here on, everything is work and common sense.
-When will we have the final reports for this season and will the data be updated with respect to the progress?
-There is updated data and we will have more data.
-Is the data from one telephone operator enough or is it necessary to incorporate the data from the others?
-Enough, they are predictable and they have everything perfectly calculated, they know perfectly well what their market share is in the national territory, and then what they do is to consider when they are hooked by a phone from abroad. If they are hooked by an Italian phone, they know perfectly well that in Italy their market share is such. It’s a rule of three.
-Are predictive algorithms within the functions intended for the site?
-Predictive algorithms, with artificial intelligence, is not something that in five years you and I won’t be able to do with two prompts. But, time will tell.
-Will there also be communication with the Smart Island?
-Smart Island depends on the Innovation department. Right now Smart Island, as far as I remember, apart from weather sensors, weather, bus GPS, parking lots and five buoys in the sea. These data will end up in the SIT. Just like the AEMET ones, to see, for example, how many cars go to X place when people can’t go to the beach. And so more buses can be put in.
Selling data, the privacy debate and more
-Is the sale of data an important line of business for telephone operators?
-Yes, right now there is a business around data. It’s a new way to get money, both for companies that already have the data and market it and for technology companies that are good at their job and what they do is go fishing for data from websites like Airbnb, etcetera. They take data, store it and then sell it to you.
-And does it make sense to connect the cab’s GPS to SITE to know the customers’ movements?
-Cab is a sector that I know absolutely nothing about. But I always say that if you come up with the question is that it can be done and it makes sense to do it. The first thing that comes to my mind is a heat map of Ibiza with timetable tracking, where cabs circulate, what are the most common routes, and so on. From here you will also have a lot of information.
-You might also know, it occurs to me, why there are vehicles in a place where there shouldn’t be on a certain day and time, like an illegal after hour in a villa.
-It’s one of the things we’ve been talking to all the mobile operators about, real time. It’s not easy. A lot of data processing centers are overseas. From the time they emit from here the antennas, get to this data center and come back processed, there is a latency of 3 to 4 days. So, the real time, going back to the questions that if you can think of it is because it can be done, it is one of the things that I have asked everybody. If it is detected that there are 400 people in a place where you don’t expect anybody, automatically a message has to be sent to the head of the Civil Guard. It will come to this, of course. It costs a lot of money, but it will come. When? Everything will depend on the interest of those who receive this data and the rest of society.
-I think it is valuable to have this information, even if it is not in real time.
-That’s right. It’s the same as digital eavesdropping on networks. Right now, today, publicly you can’t scan WhatsApp or Telegram. Maybe in two years it will change.
-The issue of privacy is a recurring debate…
-Yes. Even the issue of going out of the house to the street with a cell phone is a topic that is little talked about and that perhaps we should be more concerned about. When you go out of the house, take the wifi and bluetooth off the smartphone, and if you have the phone of the year 83, a Motorola, the better.
Through the cell phone they know your sex, they know your age, depending on the rate you have, they know your income range, if you have Netflix… There are things called buoys. There are pay channels that release sound buoys, that capture your phone. When you say “oops, it sounds like they’re listening to me,” yeah, in a way. They are like Facebook or Google pixels, but in audio format. It’s within reach of these big platforms.