In our Handbook on innovation in services and mobility in cities, we published comparative data on the cost and impact of digital vs paper tourist maps. One of our conclusions is that digital mobility costs 1,011x more than paper maps. The updated table below, reflecting the latest available data on global tourism in cities (2008), shows the scale of the burden roaming poses on cities.
The cost of roaming to global tourist cities (2008). Source: "Connected Cities: Your 256 Billion Euro Dividend"
Our data shows that, as an example, the 15 million international tourists visiting London in 2008 would have had to pay a total of EUR 102 billion in roaming charges to access the 22 million paper maps they collected that year. This is about 5x the total spending of tourists in London per year. Yet, the paper maps resource consumption constituted the equivalent of 19,000 trees – never mind the burden on dealing with the 1,600 hectares of discarded paper to the recycling systems.
But these numbers are fictional, since no tourist coughs up the EUR 4,550 per visit that these numbers imply. instead, visitors chose to disable data services and roaming, pick up a free paper map (subsidized by the local tourist industry), continuing to make use of all its functions: scribbling, asking for directions, sharing & tearing, and tracing their route. All that at a cost of zero Euros.
What then, has to change? In our book we argue that we need to fundamentally change the way we organise the cost of digital services in cities, eliminating roaming whilst adding significant commercial upsides to the operators to the tune of EUR 2 billion per year. Roaming is about 182x as costly as local data tariffs on prepaid plans, meaning that London could replace its paper maps for about EUR 560 million – or a mere 2.8% of tourist expenditure. These numbers do not take into account the efficiency gains in bulk-costs and data consumption by reversing our business models, which would reduce costs to around 1.4% of spending and could make London (or any other city choosing to become the first to tackle this issue) the first roaming-free tourist destination in the world.
Who would finance this? How about those that pay for the maps already dedicating a small percentage of their revenue instead to making theirs the most innovative and attractive tourist destination in the world…
Filed under: Connected Cities: Your 256 Billion Euro Dividend, Amsterdam, Antalya, Bangkok, Barcelona, Cairo, Dubai, Dublin, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Kiev, Kuala Lumpur, Las Vegas, Location Based Services, London, Los Angeles, Macau, Madrid, Mecca, Miami, Moscow, New Business Models, New York City, Paris, Pattaya, Prague, Roaming, Rome, Shanghai, Singapore, Toronto, Tourism, Vienna
A bit naive, no? Just eliminate roaming! Might as well cure cancer at the same time. Sure, I’d love cheaper roaming, but I don’t think my local telco will build a network in London (and NY, and Bangkok, and…) just for me and its few other customers that just happen to travel there…
In fact the economics are quite staggering, especially for data roaming. Operators are losing out on revenues because users don’t touch data functionality for lack of knowledge about costs that stand in no relation to the value created by different services. Instead, cities (or better, their tourism sectors) could come to agreements with operators to eliminate data-roaming charges in return for fixed income. A precedent was created with Talk of the Town in Stockholm some years ago, where voice roaming was exchanged for 24h flat-rates to give access to audio-guides for tourists in the city. Roaming, unlike cancer, is not a law of nature but a phenomenon of economics. Our question is why cities make no effort to unlock this barrier to becoming more accessible, more transparent, more attractive and real-time to tourists with a lot of benefits on traceability, marketing and crowd management.