The South Moravia Tourism Board has released an analysis of mobile operator data, which provides an overview of the behavior of tourists in the region and the popularity of tourist destinations. The analysis focused on the movements of visitors from seven major source markets during their stay in South Moravia, and found that the most frequent visitors to South Moravia come from Prague, Slovakia and the Ostrava region, the main time for visitors was, as is traditional, the summer season, and Brno and its surroundings played a significant role, visited by more than half of all tourists in South Moravia.
“We wanted to have a better idea of the directions in which visitors travel in South Moravia and whether we could find any trends in their movements,” said Martina Grůzová, Director of the South Moravian Central Tourism Office. “In 2024, we therefore focused on mobile data converted to the total population. They are a valuable addition to the statistics on mass accommodation facilities that the Czech Statistical Office will publish for the entire last year in February.”
Of the monitored origin areas of visitors, people from Prague and the surrounding area made up 37% of all visits to the South Moravian Region last year; other important regions are Slovakia with 22% and Ostrava with 14%.
“More than half of tourists in South Moravia headed to Brno and the surrounding area (54%), followed by the Lednice-Valtice area, Hustopečsko and Pálava,” explained Martín Šauer from the Department of Regional Economics at Masaryk University, who processed the signalling data for the Central Tourism Office. “While visitors from the Ostrava, Hradec Králové and Slovakia regions head to South Moravia primarily in the summer months, seasonality is not as pronounced for visitors from Austria or Germany.”
The data also shows that, apart from Slovakia, it is mainly Poles who come to South Moravia from abroad, accounting for 8% in 2024. “We are currently focusing a lot of our campaigns on Poland, we are publishing our promotional materials in Polish, we are trying to capture important travel fairs and we have also launched the “Taste Architecture” campaign for Polish visitors, which has proven itself well for Czech visitors in previous years,” added Grůzová.
The analysis of mobile data demonstrates the strong interconnectedness of individual tourist destinations and the role of Brno as a centre of visitor interest. Traditionally, tourists in South Moravia most often stay only one night (62%). Three quarters of visitors then stay at the same location overnight for their whole stay. People most often set off on trips from Brno, and the greatest tendency to take trips is generated by municipalities in wine regions (Velké Bílovice, Zaječí, Věstonice, Strážnice) and in the vicinity of important tourist destinations (Vranov nad Dyjí, Bílé Karpaty, Brno Dam).
Of the total 514 places visited, half of the visits in South Moravia were to the 15 most popular destinations, including Brno, Lednice, Mikulov, Valtice, Znojmo and the area around the Brno Dam. The data also show that Slovaks are the most mobile, with a quarter of them taking trips outside the area where they are accommodated.
“We now have a lot of this data available, which is why, together with the South Moravian Central Tourism Office, we are organizing an online workshop on monitoring visitor numbers and analyzing mobile operators. I will try to show everyone interested how to navigate data reports and how to interpret the data correctly,” added Šauer.
The workshop will take place on Friday, 24 January from 1:30 pm via the MS Teams platform. The complete data report is available on the website.
