Every type of tourism destination faces its own challenges, from mature destinations to the MICE industry and beyond. To address this diversity, DEPLOYTOUR is implementing five use-case pilots across Europe, each tackling key challenges specific to their context. In this article, through the example of the Julian Alps Destination network, a region lying largely within Triglav National Park, one of the most important protected areas in the Alps, we dive into how a mountain destination is confronting overtourism and climate change.
Podcast Tourism meets data – Episode 4 with Tanja Sodja
In this fourth episode, we deep dive into one of DEPLOYTOUR’s five pilots with Tanja Sodja, Digital Project Manager at Tourism Bohinj DMO, to understand how data can help manage overtourism and climate change in mountain destinations.
This article explores the key takeaways from that conversation.
The challenge: Not just numbers, but concentration
The Julian Alps are as beautiful as they are fragile. The region’s main challenge is not necessarily the total number of visitors, but the concentration of visitors in specific locations and periods (where and when they arrive). Strong seasonal peaks, particularly in summer, create intense pressure on iconic spots like Lake Bohinj, Lake Bled, and Triglav, Slovenia’s highest mountain.
The consequences ripple across the entire ecosystem. Local communities deal with traffic congestion, overcrowded public spaces, and strained infrastructure. Meanwhile, nature suffers from erosion, wildlife disturbance, and pressure on fragile ecosystems. It’s a multifactor impact. Climate change adds another layer of urgency, making responsible tourism management not just desirable, but essential.
A cross border challenge that requires cross-border thinking
One of the Julian Alps’ other distinctive features is that it spans three countries: Slovenia, Austria, and Italy. Managing tourist flows across national borders comes with a fundamental obstacle: fragmentation. Tourism systems are still largely organised at a local or national level, while visitors move freely across borders. On top of that, data exists in abundance but remains disconnected, unstandardised, and rarely used operationally.
How can data help address challenges?
So how can data actually help? The shift it enables is fundamental: moving from reactive to proactive destination management. By combining data on visitor flows, mobility, parking, trail usage, and bookings, destination managers can understand what is happening in real time and anticipate pressure points before they become problems. This enables smarter decisions: redirecting visitors, adjusting communication, or supporting a more balanced distribution of tourism across the territory.
The key is not any single dataset, but connecting multiple types of data. The Julian Alps destination is currently working on integrating:
- Visitor counting systems
- Mobility and parking data
- Trail usage data
- Accommodation and booking data
- Perception data from both visitors and residents
In that sense, data becomes a key tool for sustainability, better visitor experience, and quality of life for the residents as well.
The European Tourism Data Space: A framework for shared action
Yet data only reaches its full potential when it can travel beyond local or national borders, and this is where the European Tourism Data Space becomes essential. For the Julian Alps, the goal is to build an interoperable and connected data ecosystem where information is not simply collected locally, but shared, compared, and used across regions. DEPLOYTOUR plays a concrete role in this: it is a real-world testing ground for how these principles work in practice at the destination level. And in the Julian Alps, that destination level is itself cross-border, a non-formal association of multiple destinations spanning Slovenia, Austria, and Italy, making regional integration not just an ambition, but a daily reality.
The tools being built: Trina, Flows and YaBook
To turn this vision into reality, the Julian Alps network is developing and integrating three complementary tools: two operating behind the scenes, and one facing the market directly.
Trina is a data infrastructure being developed by Triglav National Park. Operating as a B2B solution, it connects environmental and tourism-related data across stakeholders, providing a shared backbone for the destination’s data ecosystem.
Flows, a platform developed by Arctur, is integrated across the Julian Alps Association through the D3HUB and DEPLOYTOUR projects. Its purpose is to visualise visitor flow patterns, identify hotspots, and help managers understand how visitors move through the destination in real time. It also incorporates AI-based predictive models, enabling the team to anticipate pressure points and respond proactively, going well beyond simple monitoring to support smarter decision-making.
YaBook: the Julian Alps booking ecosystem, is the customer-facing layer. Currently in soft launch, it acts as a connecting bridge between the DMO, local providers, and visitors. It is not meant to replace existing booking systems, but to complement them, offering local providers an additional sales channel while generating valuable data on demand, booking behavior, and visitor patterns. Crucially, YaBook will be interconnected with both Trina and Flows, closing the loop between market activity and destination management intelligence.
Together, these three tools are positioning the Julian Alps as “a living laboratory for data-driven sustainable tourism.”
Advice for Other Mountain Destinations
The Julian Alps’ experience holds lessons for any mountain or nature-based destination facing similar pressures.
- Start with collaboration, not technology. Data ecosystems only work when stakeholders are genuinely willing to work together and share information. Jumping straight to technology without that foundation rarely succeeds.
- Start simple. Even basic data becomes highly valuable when it is connected and used consistently over time.
- Focus on practical use. The goal is never to collect data, it is to use that data to make better decisions.
Key messages
- Tourism is not just about attracting visitors anymore. It is about managing it responsibly.
- Destination need to combine data, digital tools, and strong partnerships.
- Our role is quite simple: we need to digitise the predictable and humanise the unpredictable.