COLLABORATIVE PLATFORMS IN ACCOMMODATION important and, as MARTÍNEZ GUTIERREZ points out, “in the case of tourist cities, the search for, implementation, development, and management through Smart models is an imperative and essential need”4. Thus, the digitization of management processes and public services is a cardinal point. As stated in the Commission Communication entitled Digital Compass 2030: Europe’s approach for the Digital Decade5, digital transformation must enable more effective public action, including police and investigative capacities. This highlights the important role that public administrations are called upon to play in limiting or monitoring activity. In this environment, the use of new technologies by public administrations in the exercise of tourism inspection is becoming increasingly frequent. Certain European cities (Barcelona and Berlin) are pioneering online tracking to optimize the management of tourist accommodation in the destination using big data and analytics technologies. In this way, in collaboration with companies specializing in web scraping technology, VUT digital platforms are being monitored to detect the supply of tourist accommodation marketed in the destination. In this way, the Administration collects the information on the websites of the collaborative platforms, including such investigations in its inspection plans, thus bringing to light opaque or submerged activities. Web scraping systems or software automatically perform real-time queries through the platforms’ APIs. This extracted and compiled information is integrated into a single directory to subsequently compare the results obtained at a specific moment with the historical data stored in a database. Finally, the information is updated for analysis and obtaining results. The use of these techniques is a very innovative alternative for measuring the phenomenon of TUVs and, above all, it is very useful for exercising public control over the private activity. So much so that the experience of Barcelona and Berlin is shared as a good practice to be imitated by the tourist destinations of the Smart Destinations Network6. The fact that the Administration develops its inspection powers using these new ICT tools based on web scraping certainly means that the Administration 4 Martinez Gutiérrez, R., 2018, p. 30. 5 Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic, and Social Committee, and the Committee of the Regions (2021). Digital Compass 2030: Europe’s approach to the Digital Decade, Brussels, 9.3.2021 COM 118 final. 6 SEGITTUR and RED de Destinos Turísticos Inteligentes (2021). Guide to good practices in digitization for Smart Tourist Destinations: 50 good digital practices for a new generation of destinations, Available at: https:// www.segittur.es/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Guia-50bbpp-digitalizacion-para-destinos-DTI_Segittur.pdf, date of last access: 3 December 2021.
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