Benidorm participates in a panel on tourism data management at the Greencities conference in Malaga

Benidorm was the protagonist of a panel on Wednesday at the Greencities conference in Malaga on the management of tourist data and the application of technology to improve the experience of citizens and tourists, two subjects in which the city has been working for years and in which it is a national and international reference. The mayor of Benidorm, Toni Pérez, presented these ideas at this professional meeting, the main one in Spain that connects public and private actors to promote intelligent urban transformation and mobility, focused on citizens and with sustainability as the main axis.

The mayor participated in the panel entitled 'Smart tourism: new technologies to improve the citizen experience', and he highlighted that good data management "can bring enormous benefits to destinations." “Benidorm has been at the forefront of smart management of tourist destinations,” said Toni Pérez, after recalling that the city was in 2018 “the first certified tourist destination in the world” with the UNE 178501 standard, a recognition that it has renewed again in 2024 after exceeding all the requirements set by SEGITTUR.

During his speech, in a panel in which he was accompanied by experts such as John Mora, Vice President of the Smart Cities Commission of AMETIC; Pedro Garibi, Head of Smart Cities and Tourism at T-Systems; José María Troya, Director of Specialist Sales at Telefónica Spain; and Enrique Martínez, President of SEGITTUR, Toni Pérez explained that “tourists enjoy destinations, and that is where use cases and efficient management of them can make a competitive leap.”

Specifically, he explained that “when we talk about tourists, the data is grandiloquent, but when we go down to the territory, to the municipality where the tourist experience takes place, and we can apply efficiency measures, measure them, upload the data, compare and see use cases of who manages what best, we will find ourselves in a paradigm of cooperation, evolution and coordination of actions that can help us enormously to move forward.”

As examples of this management and this shared use of data, Pérez has referred to two specific tools. On the one hand, he has valued that the Smart Destination Platform (PID) “will be a true revolution in public tourism policies at a global level”, with which “Spain will once again show the way by demonstrating that it is the first country in terms of tourism competitiveness in the world.” On the other hand, he referred to the Biontrend project, a “collaborative tool in collaboration with the hotel sector where every night 50 specific establishments transfer their entire forecast, number of past, present and future reservations to 365 days, which allows you to be able to design very interesting governance and strategies.”

Finally, the mayor defended the need to continue delving into this digital transformation. “Cities are already, without knowing it, the great generators of data with the day-to-day management of the city, but we can have the capacity to continue advancing further,” he concluded.