Vol.:(0123456789) Information Technology & Tourism (2019) 21:23–43 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-018-0130-y 1 3 ORIGINAL RESEARCH Determining the usual environment of cardholders as a key factor to measure the evolution of domestic tourism Juan de Dios Romero Palop 1  · Juan Murillo Arias 1  · Diego J. Bodas‑Sagi 1  · Heribert Valero Lapaz 1 Received: 26 April 2018 / Revised: 20 November 2018 / Accepted: 24 November 2018 / Published online: 13 December 2018 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Domestic tourism is harder to analyse compared to international tourism due to its smaller data footprint generation, as most times private means of transport are used, no border is crossed, and no lodging is registered. Digital data sources can be a use- ful, but still underused, complement to ofcial survey-based statistics to fll this lack of reliable information. The present paper covers a research gap in the use of card transactions data (on site payments and cash withdrawals) to provide an inno- vative methodology to enhance vision on domestic tourism dynamics. The chosen approach is based on the United Nations World Tourism Organization defnition of ‘usual environment’: “the geographical area (though not necessarily a contiguous one) within which an individual conducts his/her regular life routines” Upon this premise, a methodology has been developed in order to use transactional footprints of cardholders to delineate their usual environment, and subsequently to classify transactions as ‘touristic’ or ‘non-touristic’. So as to ensure scalability, the resulting procedure is non- territory reliant, and can therefore be adapted to diferent geogra- phies by varying one single parameter. Some practical applications are described in Sect. 5 through two use cases carried out in Spain and Mexico by BBVA. Keywords Usual environment · Big data · Domestic tourism · Digital footprint · Payments · Applied data science This is an extended version of a conference paper entitled “Using Transactional Data to Determine the Usual Environment of Cardholders” previously published in the proceedings of Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2018 Conference (ENTER 2018) held in Jönköping, Sweden, January 24–26, 2018. * Juan de Dios Romero Palop juandedios.romero@bbvadata.com; jromeropalop@gmail.com Extended author information available on the last page of the article