About us
Introduction
The Barcelona Tourism Observatory: city and region (OTB) is the working platform for statistical information on tourism, knowledge, and market intelligence in the city of Barcelona and the rest of Barcelona province. It is composed by the Barcelona City Council, the Barcelona Regional Council, the Cambra de Comerç de Barcelona and the consortium Turisme de Barcelona.
Publicly presented in June 2017, the OTB was the culmination of the joint work iniciated in 2015 by the Barcelona City Council, the Barcelona Regional Council and Turisme de Barcelona, as a result of the synergies and the desire to promote the knowledge and market intelligence in tourism of each of the institutions. Subsequently, the incorporation of the Cambra de Comerç de Barcelona into the project in 2019 provided a wider vision, reinforcing the transversal and disseminating nature of the project.
Over the last few years, the OTB has developed a fruitful work, that has led to new perspectives, serving as a tool to transfer and bring together tourism knowledge, optimising the investment of economic and human resources, with the integration of individual projects of each of the entities into larger and shared studies. In this way, the OTB offers an integral vision of Destination Barcelona and the knowledge required to manage and promote tourism.
Our mission
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To generate knowledge by providing analysis, description and evaluation of tourism activity, by monitoring it in an intelligent and transversal way
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To establish common methodological criteria in the quantification and characterisation of tourism activity
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To facilitate and accelarate decision-making by actively transferring the knowledge to stakeholders linked to the activity, in order to increase their competitiveness and the citizens’ life quality, from academia, public administration, private companies and citizens themselves
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To contribute to the sustainability of tourism activity in all its dimensions
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To promote the city and the region as an international reference in the area of sustainable tourism observation in urban areas, as well as sharing knowledge
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To actively contribute to the future Tourism Intelligence System of Catalonia
Lines of work
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Monitoring and forecasting of tourism activity
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Tourist Profile and Habits
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Sustainable Tourism Indicators System - SITS OTB
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Specialised case studies
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Tourism Online Reputation
Geographical area
The OTB has three territorial levels of data analysis:
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Barcelona city
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Barcelona region (Barcelona province except Barcelona city)
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Destination Barcelona (Barcelona province as a whole)
Organization
The OTB is a working platform which joins the four institution professional teams dedicated to the production of statistical data on tourism: the LABturisme of the Barcelona Regional Council, the Direction of Tourism, Events and Creative Industries of the Barcelona City Council, Cabinet of Economic Studies and Infrastructures of Cambra de Comerç, and the Knowledge and Research Department of Turisme de Barcelona.
Find out more about the four of the institutions