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.

Image of busy street during the Edinburgh Festival
Photo of Ricardo de Azambuja

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.

Photo of Ricardo de Azambuja
Building plans

Our Tourism & Festivals Hub

Edinburgh Futures Institute

The EFI will be a global centre for multi-disciplinary, challenge-based DDI research, teaching and societal impact. The biggest challenges that the world faces are complex and interconnected. Solving them requires multiple orientations and understandings. EFI’s approach brings the arts, humanities and the social sciences into contiguity with data science, natural sciences and with medicine – to co-create deeply interdisciplinary models.

For more information contact:

Jude Henderson, Director of Operations, Edinburgh Futures Institute, Edinburgh Futures Institute

Image of Joshua Ryan-Saha

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.

Image of Joshua Ryan-Saha