RFID-Based Action Tracking for Measuring the Impact of Cultural Events on Tourism

Organization of cultural events in a tourist destination often demands large investments. For this reason, authorities, tourism managers and operators need data to support their decisions, define their strategies and, in general terms, they are interested in measuring the economic impact of such events on tourism. In this paper, we propose a lightweight framework that can be applied to gather data on the places tourists visit during an event. The framework is based on an action tracking system that exploits RFID technologies on an existing city card circuit. The main choices necessary to design a system that allows to satisfy technical, organizational and budget constraints are described referring to its application to two important recent festivals — Trento FilmFestival and the Festival of Economics — characterized by very different content, history, and targets.