This paper proposes a new strategy for nowcasting tourist overnight stays in Italy by exploiting payment card data and Google Search indices. The strategy is applied to national and regional overnight stays in a time period that includes the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a significant and unanticipated shock to tourism flows and payment habits.
The proposed methodology allows us to obtain information on tourism in almost real time, preceding the publication of the official data by at least four months. Our results show that indicators based on payment data are very informative for nowcasting tourist volumes, both at the national and at the regional level. Instead, the informative power of Google Search data is limited, especially in areas hosting a small share of international tourists.