Bologna Welcome and the hell of analysis

One of the things our Bologna BnB host told us was to consider getting the Bologna Welcome card, which cost money but gave you free access to museums/sites that would nickel and dime you. There were two price points: 20 Euro for two days, 30 Euro for 3 days, free admission to any special museum exhibits, and a free hop-on-hop-off bus pass for one day. Since that pass was 15 each, we thought we could get more value for our money, as long as we worked in a bus ride. 

When we signed up for the card at the Bologna visitors center, they took down a surprising amount of information, including passport stuff. It was apparent that the tourism board cared about detailed demographic info. The card was a great way to tally up which sites you visited and when, which leads to an aggregate of data that could be used to adjust promotional material according to which sites got a lot of, or perhaps needed a lot of traffic. It could also differentiate promotions to different nationalities, like if Germans always visited the same museum more than other nationalities. I remember at the top of San Luca, the attendant there manually tallied what country visitors were from, and she was standing in front of a big chart showing that breakdown for a pretty specific year-on-year time period. 

I was a little uncomfortable being a participant to such a stark data targeting effort, but I've definitely been on the other side, so that's karma, I guess.