Prague will use anonymized data from Mastercard payment cards for the needs of city planning, tourism development and other projects. Mayor Zdeněk Hřib (Pirates) and Mastercard Director for the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic Michal Čarný today signed a memorandum by which the city joined the platform called City Possible. The company data is already used by the city company Prague City Tourism (PCT) to target marketing campaigns to support inbound tourism.
According to Čarný, 325 cities have joined the Mastercard City Possible project. Based on the partnership, Prague will receive free access to data sets with aggregated information on payments and other behavior of cardholders. “We are able to look at a wide range of different things. The most important are the data on how tourists find their way before they make it, but also how they evaluate it afterwards,” he said. He added that data from hotel and flight reservations are also available.
The city would like to use the data in areas other than tourism. The director of the city company ICT Operator (OICT) Tomáš Barczi said that information on the movement of people can be useful in transport or land use planning. According to him, however, the specific use will only become apparent when interpreting the data. “By getting the data, it is just beginning, together we will have to find a way to make the best use of the data,” he said. “The capital is also seeking further partnerships with other private companies, for example in the field of transport,” added Hřib.
PCT has been working with Mastercard in a similar spirit since 2019. PCT Director František Cipro said today that the company used the data to design a recent marketing campaign. According to him, it showed, for example, that in addition to culture lovers, people who prefer a healthly style also started looking at the Czech capital. “This was especially true for the Germans and Austrians, so we targeted our campaign with visuals that somehow resemble a healthy lifestyle,” he said.
Source: CTK
