Tourism & festivals

Arts and culture festivals – not least Edinburgh’s world-famous festivals - attract millions of tourists to major tourist destinations each year, but we can use information on activity and events to improve our visitors’ experiences and help businesses adapt to challenges.

Image of busy street during the Edinburgh Festival

Travel Tech For Scotland

Traveltech for Scotland, helps Scotland’s tourism sector make a sustained recovery, launched in summer 2020. Driven by technological innovation, it will build a support network for travel technology pioneers whose ingenuity could help turn the sector around following the devastating impacts of Covid-19.

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Smart Tourism In the Age of the General Data Protection

Univeristy of Edinburgh Researcher Ricardo de Azambuja has developed cutting-edge technology to observe, analyse and better manage tourist flows at Edinburgh festival visitor venues, while still remaining GDPR compliant.

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Our Tourism & Festivals Hub

Edinburgh Futures Institute

Edinburgh Futures Institute offers data-rich learning, teaching, research and innovation – and does so in an open environment that fosters collaborations with communities, public, private and third sector organisations. EFI’s mission is to harnesses academic expertise to make a step change in society’s ability to respond to the world’s greatest challenges and deliver benefits locally and around the world. EFI’s ethos is that the development and use of new technologies is too often seen as a purely technical challenge. EFI sees human and social needs as an equally important part of the challenge and brings expertise in ethics, law, policy, philosophy and creativity in conversation with technical expertise to create a better future.

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Joshua Ryan-Saha

Tourism & Festivals

Joshua works in the Edinburgh & South East Scotland City Region, developing a plan for the radical and dynamic use of tourism data. He aims to push forward innovative data use in tourism that has the potential to boost not only the sector itself but the entire regional economy.