Routes to Roots Wins Award for Data-Driven Tourism Strategy
Routes to Roots, a data-driven tourism project combining mobile phone mobility data with research, won Thailand's Creative Data Award for uncovering real travel patterns and identifying new tourism opportunities across the country.
Bangkok, August 17, 2026 — As Thailand's tourism landscape shifts, Ministry of Tourism and Sports data shows visitor arrivals down 3.05% year-on-year. The challenge for Thailand may not simply be attracting more tourists, but ensuring each journey—by Thai and foreign travelers alike—creates greater value, drives equitable tourism that spreads economic opportunity to communities, and builds sustainable local growth.
The key question is: do we understand today's actual travel patterns? This is where Routes to Roots begins: a collaborative project that combines True Corporation's anonymized mobility data from mobile phone usage with research and creative thinking to uncover real tourist travel patterns and transform that data into new opportunities for Thai tourism. Routes to Roots has just won the Creative Data Award at the Creative Excellence Awards 2026, organized by the Creative Economy Agency.
From Networks That Connect People to Insights That Help Us Understand Them
For decades, the primary role of the telecommunications industry has been connecting people through voice and internet. In the digital age, another high-potential asset emerging on networks is mobility data—information about how people move—which, when used responsibly alongside research, can become insight to address economic, social, and urban challenges. This represents another step: from networks that connect people to insights that help us understand them, and using that understanding to create value for society.
Arouma Wattanasuuk, Head of GCEO Strategic Agenda and Employee Communication at True Corporation, said: "The role of the telecommunications industry today doesn't stop at creating the best networks to deliver the best customer experience. It also includes leveraging the potential of mobility data—a unique data asset of our industry—for public benefit. True aims to open collaborative space for business, researchers, government, the creative sector, and communities to bring data and knowledge together, transforming data into understanding and understanding into new opportunities, advancing policy design, agenda-setting, and decision-making that create value for people, communities, and the nation."
Associate Professor Nathapong Pantnoi, Deputy Director of the Center for Social Design Excellence and Assistant Dean at the Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University, said: "The real challenge is not having more data, but using data to view tourism from a new angle—from provincial boundaries to actual travel systems and connections between cities. Analyzing over 500 million trips in mobility data, we discovered 21 potential tourism clusters and developed 6 pilot clusters that blend data with the identity, culture, and resources of each area. This is evidence-based tourism development that transforms real data into tourism development proposals, leading to policies aligned with each area's potential and helping distribute tourists, investment, and income to cities and communities more equitably and sustainably."
