Potential applications of cellular phone systems for measuring and modeling tourist movement

Measuring the volume and describing the structure of tourist movement seems be one of the crucial tasks of subjects responsible for creating and executing tourism policy. Information on the above-mentioned parameters constitutes the fundamental factor for tourism management at all levels of state administration (i.e. national, regional, local). Its importance manifests itself not only in current activities but also (or possibly foremost) in programming and planning tourism development. What seems to be of crucial importance in both latter processes is creating a proper volume, as well as dimensional, temporal and generic structure, optimal for a particular area (i.e. a city, county, province, country). Generating and executing tourism policy in different spatial arrangements, in particular modeling tourist movement, requires reliable data. Meanwhile, insofar applied methods of statistical registration or other related ways of measuring tourist movement prove imperfect, hence affecting negatively the quality of tourism planning. As a matter of fact, planning activities in tourism sector are frequently criticized both in the countries with highly developed tourism and those still aspiring to such a high-profile status. The paper presents basic assumptions of Telephone System for Cellular Analysis of Tourist Movement (TelSKART©), which is an innovative method of measuring the volume of tourist movement, using second and third generation of cellular phone technology (i.e. GSM - Global System for Mobile Communications, and UMTS – Universal Mobile Telecommunications System).