Visit to Vodafone as Costa del Sol mayor travels to Madrid Spain

TAKING advantage of a trip to Madrid to represent Benalmadena at the Fitur Tourism Exhibition, mayor Victor Navas accompanied by representatives of local company Innoben, to visit the Vodafone Business Experience Centre.

Following the visit, the mayor said that the council wanted the municipality to be at the forefront of data mining and collecting data so was interested in working with a large organisation in the  sector of technological innovation and telecommunications,.

The new option to utilise ‘Big Data’ which is a form of complex analysis to allow information to be extracted from numerous sources has meant that Benalmadena has a much better understanding of a number of important tourist trends including visitors tastes and preferences, their origins, their reasons for choosing the town and why they might come back.

Coupled with this is the ability to study the reputation of hotels and tourist establishments and to learn for the future how to adapt to meet visitors needs and expectations.

During their visit they discovered an app that detects the actual number of those living in the municipality, through the analysis of information coming from smart-phones.

The mayor explained that “Benalmadena currently has about 68,000 registered residents, but, by analysing the consumption of water or the volume of rubbish, we believe that the population that really resides in the town is people.”

This is the sort of technology which would allow the council to discover the number of unregistered residents and to plan campaigns aimed at them as any increase in the number of the council rolls would lead to an increase in financial aid from both the regional administration and the National Government.