Customer Data and Crisis Monitoring in Flanders and Brussels

Abstract

Visit Flanders promotes Flanders (the northern part of Belgium) and Brussels internationally. Visit Flanders has experimented with big data in different forms: web monitoring (all publicly available sources, including social media), flight data, mobile data, scraping hotel review scores, and credit card data. We have learnt about the possibilities and challenges with interpreting and using them effectively. This article focuses on crisis monitoring and how Visit Flanders has used web monitoring data and flight data for market segments. Brussels was linked to terrorism in November 2015 when the Paris attacks happened and in March 2016 when Brussels was facing a terrorist attack. Fast reactions were required, based on fast data. In 2015 only web monitoring data were available at Visit Flanders. This query was reused in 2016 and flight data was also monitored. More intensive monitoring was needed then because of the greater March 2016 tourism threat. Big data helped Visit Flanders to react separately to individual markets.