Standardizing European city tourism statistics

The major problems that city tourism managers face are the availability and comparability of market research information for their own city and their strongest competitors. To overcome this problem in market volume and share studies on European city tourism, an intelligent database system was developed. A comprehensive knowledge acquisition process on the quality and comparability of the statistics led to a prototype version of an expert system approved by leading European city tourism office managers. Additional tests of the system's accuracy showed reasonable results and helped reveal further possibilities for improving its performance. The final outcome of this model represents the largest, standardized longitudinal data set on European city tourism.