Technology partners equip seaside resort with WLAN tracking and Smart Data

The corona pandemic has an immense impact on the tourism and event industry in particular. Often the necessary safety distance to other visitors at hotspots can only be maintained inadequately. The seaside resort St. Peter-Ording wants to meet this challenge with a digital solution. It informs guests via a traffic light system about highly frequented zones. The project, which is supported by the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry, started today.

St. Peter-Ording/Norderstedt, July 17, 2020 – The project's goal is to measure and record occupancy and passenger density at certain neuralgic points with potentially high visitor volumes. These pose particular challenges in corona times. Together with the three project partners, Neusta Destination Solutions, hubermedia and Lufthansa Industry Solutions, the St. Peter-Ording tourism centre has therefore developed a digital solution. It first collects data via anonymized WLAN tracking, anonymized image recognition to measure the density of people and occupancy rates using camera and laser technology, evaluates this data and displays it using a traffic light system - for example in digital terminals such as visitors' smartphones. 

With this solution, the project partners hope to achieve a steering effect for visitors and (day) visitors. "The idea for a project basically already came to us when we were dealing with our extensive measures for distance and hygiene measures both online and offline in May and, after the travel ban was lifted, we sometimes had the impression that we were reaching the limits of our existing measures and technologies," says Constanze Höfinghoff, Tourism Director St. Peter-Ordings. 

While the partners Neusta Destination Solutions and hubermedia are responsible for the installation and integration of WLAN tracking in addition to the development of the web app, LHIND is designing and developing a system that uses a smart data process to exploit the information extracted from cameras and laser scanning and incorporates this into the real-time recognition of visitor flows. "We are not yet aware of any destination where these visitor guidance technologies have been used to date. This is already quite common at festivals and in stadiums," says Sebastian Blumenthal, Business Segment Manager at Lufthansa Industry Solutions. "With Scharbeutz on the Baltic Sea as the second pilot location, Schleswig-Holstein is showing a strong innovative strength here. 

The kick-off meeting took place on Wednesday, July 15, 2020 with an inspection of the locations and determination of the appropriate technology. According to the schedule, all necessary equipment is to be ordered, delivered and installed within the next 14 days. At the same time, the software preparations at all contract partners are running at full speed. "During the last week of July we want to start the first testing, in the first week of August we hope to start live operation", says Höfinghoff, "we need the technology as well as the data quickly in order to be able to meet the challenges of the corona period even better than before".