Integrating Mobile Network Operator data into tourism statistics: Operationalizing the usual environment and evidence from venice

Tourism statistics are traditionally based on survey and administrative data, ensuring methodological rigor and international comparability but often lacking fine spatial and temporal resolution. The growing availability of Mobile Network Operator (MNO) data offers new opportunities to complement official statistics by providing detailed insights into population mobility and tourism dynamics. This paper reviews existing official and big data approaches to tourism measurement and proposes an operational framework to infer the concept of usual environment using MNO data. The proposed methodology is validated through comparison with official statistics and applied to a case study focusing on the municipality of Venice and the north-eastern coastal area of the Veneto region. Using daily mobility indicators and sub-municipal analysis, the study illustrates how MNO data enable the measurement of tourism patterns, excursionist presence, and intra-urban population dynamics at a level of detail not typically available from traditional sources. The results confirm the potential of mobility data as a complementary input to official tourism statistics, while highlighting the importance of maintaining conceptual consistency with established statistical definitions.