When using MPD for tourism statistics, one should consider the following technical, financial and legal aspects [1]:

  • Data access: some data sources can be accessed by the users with the simple IT skills (e.g., samples of Twitter tweets); some has to be purchased (e.g., historical tweets); some needs partnerships/collaborations with companies (e.g., Yahoo!, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc); some are not publicly available (Google company does not share data, except for some aggregate indexes, e.g., Google Trends).
  • Dataset: sometimes the dataset is not rich enough for estimating trends or changes in trends in migration flows.
  • Legal obstacles: companies may have terms and conditions or non-disclosure agreements for data sharing policy.


[1] Hughes, C., Zagheni, E., Abel, G. J., Sorichetta, A., Wi'sniowski, A., Weber, I., & Tatem, A. J. (2016). Inferring migrations: traditional methods and new approaches based on mobile phone, social media, and other big data: feasibility study on inferring (labour) mobility and migration in the European Union from big data and social media data.


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