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This paper introduces experiences with mobile positioning data in the web-based tourism management and monitoring system: “Positium Barometer”. The system has been developed for tourism enterprises, public authorities, scientists and planners to obtain statistical overviews and standardized analyses about the space-time movement of tourists. Positium Barometer uses passive mobile positioning data —location data that is stored automatically in the memory files (billing memory, hand-over logs etc) of mobile operators. Our database consists of records of the locations of roaming call activities in Estonia. Data is stored for every call activity of a foreign phone in Estonia. The data is anonymous, phone numbers and user data are not identified by mobile operators. LBS (Location Based Services) data is a new and promising source for studying the geography of tourism and space-time behaviour since the data is spatially more precise than questionnaires or accommodation statistics. The biggest problem of mobile positioning is fear of surveillance.

We introduce mobile positioning based data sources in tourism studies using the case study of tourism in Tartu, Estonia. Mobile positioning data is a promising source for tourism geography as it is one easiest and most cost effective sources for investigating the flows of tourists with relatively good spatial and temporal coverage. Mobile positioning data allows one to link the digital track of visitors with visited events and locations retrospectively. The data also has potential for the development of real-time monitoring tools for tourism planning and management, as it has been tested in Estonia with “Positium Tourism Barometer”. The biggest problem with positioning data is privacy and surveillance, and those issues needs to be addressed and discussed very carefully.