Port and city: shared data

Who decides during a call

A systematic review found just six articles on port governance that also cover cruising, and the authors flag this scarcity as their work's main limitation.^[1] Four models emerge from the literature, from a large port run by a port authority acting as an entrepreneur to a small port in a passive role, with operation by terminal operators in between.^[1] According to the authors, the entry of private operators, cruise lines included, benefits the destination only if on-board, port and attraction activities are integrated.^[1]

The manuscript on "smart cruising" likewise notes that actors along the chain mostly act on their own, coordinating only at stages such as embarkation and disembarkation.^[3] And the "Smart Cruise Destination" model starts from the observation that there is still no system joining up city, port and ship.^[2]

The data most needed are the hardest to get

In the draft blueprint for the European tourism data space, across more than 900 catalogued initiatives and sources, economic-impact sources clearly outnumber social-impact ones (77.3% vs 22.3%); under 5% are updated more often than daily, 95.6% are released with a delay and only 18.4% can be accessed remotely.^[5] In the survey of 201 stakeholders, visitor-flow, location and real-time data rank among the most wanted yet hard-to-get data.^[5]

In the Valencian network of smart destinations, 96.6% of the 58 responding destinations have a strategic tourism plan, yet two in three (67.2%) publish no open tourism data.^[4] The opportunity managers endorse most is precisely better management of flows and overcrowding (mean 6.34 out of 7).^[4] The most felt barriers are lack of budget and technical capacity and weak public-private collaboration, while legislation is not seen as an obstacle.^[4]

Sharing without losing control

Citing a technology supplier's report, the "smart cruising" study notes that in many ports actors do not share the data needed, so there is no common decision system; as a response it points to collaborative port-call decision-making systems.^[3] The authors of the "Smart Cruise Destination" model indicate that, before building a platform, it is necessary to define which data to exchange and to tackle standards, security and privacy.^[2]

The Valencian destinations point to a dual track: each dataset available both in open form and in data spaces with agreements and terms of use set by the destination.^[4] The European draft goes the same way: the open-data logic of administrations has to be reconciled with that of businesses, which want to earn value from their data and keep control of it; almost half of stakeholders (47%) would consider data-for-data swaps with no payment.^[5] Proposed use cases include forecasts of when a place will exceed its capacity and resident-facing dashboards with congestion levels.^[5]

Where ports are starting

At the Port of Barcelona, 77 internal interviews and 12 with other ports led to 80 possible digital twin applications for the port authority.^[6] Almost all interviewed ports are taking their first steps, and according to the authors defining objectives clearly matters more than technical requirements.^[6] The port authority, terminals and providers collect different data in different ways, which tends to produce solutions that are hard to replicate; among the criteria for launching an application, ports rank first the effect on other members of the port community and environmental impact.^[6] The study does not specifically address cruising.^[6]

In the analysis of five European port cities, knowing cruise passengers' movements is described as a key factor for planning the city, transport and itineraries, and the authors point to the advantages of information sharing among cruise lines, ports and operators.^[7]