Tourism and territorial intelligence:

analysis of the situational mapping manual of Goiás

Abstract

This article analyzes the 2025 Situational Mapping Manual, developed by the Goiás State Tourism Observatory, as a territorial intelligence tool to support tourism planning and public management. The study adopts a qualitative, descriptive, and exploratory approach based on document analysis of the manual and a literature review on tourism planning, tourism observatories, territorial intelligence, and evidence-based management. The findings demonstrate that the proposed methodology integrates demographic, socioeconomic, institutional, territorial, and digital indicators, moving beyond approaches focused solely on tourism attractions. The model enables the production of comparable diagnoses across Goiás municipalities, strengthens tourism regionalization, and supports data-driven public policymaking. It also incorporates information from digital platforms as a complement to official databases, expanding the understanding of destination visibility. The study concludes that the manual constitutes an important methodological reference for strengthening public intelligence in tourism, although its effectiveness depends on continuous data updating, technical capacity building, and the effective integration of diagnostic results into decision-making processes.