Novosibirsk Uses GeoEffect Platform to Develop Tourism
The GeoEffect system has helped identify the most popular places and events, build profiles of different tourist groups and determine which regions send the most visitors to the city.
Novosibirsk Region is Siberia’s most popular region among tourists. More than 3 million people visited it over the course of a year. Revenue from tourism in Novosibirsk was estimated at RUB 25.3 billion (about $304 million) in 2025. Visitors to Novosibirsk most often come from Krasnoyarsk Region, Kuzbass and Altai, while international travelers arrive from countries including China, Kazakhstan, Germany, India and Turkey.
Developing the tourism sector requires continuous analysis of the most popular destinations and services. Today, modern tools are making this kind of analytics more accessible, and one of them is the GeoEffect platform.
What’s the Effect?
The Novosibirsk Tourist Information Center (TIC), working with MTS, conducted a study of tourist flows using GeoEffect, a geoanalytics platform powered by big data. The analysis helped identify the main tourist hotspots, build a profile of the target audience and pinpoint the regions that send the largest numbers of visitors to Novosibirsk.
Analysis of anonymized data allowed the Tourist Information Center to gauge the popularity of individual locations and events by visitor numbers. The findings helped inform decisions about infrastructure changes, and the center is strengthening information services at the most popular locations by distributing printed materials and installing signs and information kiosks.
“Any service that collects statistical and analytical information is always a major help in making the Novosibirsk Tourist Information Center more effective. The more information we have about our visitors, the better we can tailor our work to them. For example, the language of a website and social media, as well as the visual design of materials, will differ considerably depending on whether we are addressing a business traveler or, say, students on the road. Traditional methods of gathering information – numerical statistics, surveys and hotel reports – often fail to provide the full picture. What we liked about GeoEffect was how visual it is. A heat map of tourist hotspots will help us make evidence-based decisions about developing tourism infrastructure exactly where it is needed,” said Polina Naidenova, head of the tourism information department at the Novosibirsk Tourist Information Center.
Unexpected Hotspots and New Visitors
You might think everyone already knows the popular places where tourists spend their time. But the analysis produced results that were less predictable than expected. One surprisingly popular destination among tourists turned out to be the Central Market.
The analysis uncovered another trend: Novosibirsk is becoming an increasingly attractive destination not only for visitors from neighboring regions but also for people from the Urals. Regional authorities will now pay particular attention to targeted information campaigns. Using data on the regions that send the most tourists, the TIC and its media partners are launching targeted promotion of events taking place in Novosibirsk.
The tourist profiles generated by the platform are also worth noting. They help tailor content and visual materials to different audience segments – for example, emphasizing business infrastructure for business travelers or youth-oriented routes for students.
Russian Technology in Practice
Novosibirsk offers an example of Russian geoanalytics and large-scale anonymized telecom data processing being used not in finance or advertising, but in tourism, culture and leisure.
The positive results could encourage other regions to turn to Russian analytics tools, including GeoEffect. For Novosibirsk, the data will make it possible to quickly shift attention toward the places and events that visitors actually favor. GeoEffect can determine the geographic makeup of audiences at festivals, concerts and city celebrations, allowing subsequent events to be advertised specifically in regions where demand is strongest.
Data on actual visits to locations can reveal less obvious tourist hotspots and bring them into routes and travel guides. The tool also supports media content personalization. Tourism websites, social media, advertising materials and event selections can be tailored to the target audience’s age, type of trip and other characteristics.
Big data is increasingly making its way into culture, events and tourism, influencing which events are promoted, what goes into tourism materials and where infrastructure is developed. Experts say IT tools for automatically collecting and analyzing data in tourism and culture will see growing demand. Over time, this kind of data could become the basis for shaping city event calendars and allocating marketing budgets.
