Editorial board editor-in-chief

POTENTIAl APPlICATIONS OF CEllulAR PHONE SYSTEmS
FOR mEASuRING AND mODElING TOuRIST mOVEmENT
w
iesław
a
leJziak
Chair of Tourism Economy University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow, Poland
Abstract:
 
Measuring the volume and describing the structure of tourist movement seems be one of the crucial tasks of subjects 
responsible for creating and executing tourism policy. Information on the above-mentioned parameters constitutes the fundamental 
factor for tourism management at all levels of state administration (i.e. national, regional, local). Its importance manifests itself 
not only in current activities but also (or possibly foremost) in programming and planning tourism development. What seems 
to be of crucial importance in both latter processes is creating a proper volume, as well as dimensional, temporal and generic 
structure, optimal for a particular area (i.e. a city, county, province, country). Generating and executing tourism policy in differ
-
ent spatial arrangements, in particular modeling tourist movement, requires reliable data. Meanwhile, insofar applied methods 
of statistical registration or other related ways of measuring tourist movement prove imperfect, hence affecting negatively the 
quality of tourism planning. As a matter of fact, planning activities in tourism sector are frequently criticized both in the countries 
with highly developed tourism and those still aspiring to such a high-proile status. The paper presents basic assumptions of 
Telephone System for Cellular Analysis of Tourist Movement (TelSKART
©
), which is an innovative method of measuring the 
volume of tourist movement, using second and third generation of cellular phone technology (i.e. 
GSM – Global System for 
Mobile Communications, and UMTS – Universal Mobile Telecommunications System
).