Smart Tourism – Management and Marketing for the Whole Ecosystem

Professor Dimitrios Buhalis of Bournemouth University will explain that Smart Tourism revolutionizes tourism and hospitality and change market conditions and industry structure. This leads to tourism and hospitality organisations to readdress the sources of competitiveness and repositioning their strategy and operations in their marketplace. Network economics and strategies suggest that organization need to reengineer their processes to take advantage of their ecosystem. Technology has emerged as the pervasive and robust platform for the tourism organisation and destination distribution and management. The Web 2.0 and consumer generated content based social media engagement are revolutionising global tourism. New developments such as Augmented Reality provide incredible opportunities for tourism organisations to develop their competitiveness. Only tourism organisations and destinations that can take full advantage of the opportunities will be able to capitalise on the benefits in the future and enhance their competitiveness. This seminar will challenge participants to think of their use of technology and their digital foot print to maximise their visibility, engagement, conversion and loyalty. Participants will be encouraged to think of how they can cocreate tourism experiences and how they can develop benefits for all participants in the marketplace.

Smartness takes advantage of interconnectivity and interoperability of integrated technologies to reengineer processes and data in order to produce innovative services, products and procedures towards maximising value for all stakeholders. This reengineering enables shaping products, actions, processes and services in real-time, by engaging different stakeholders simultaneously to optimise the collective performance and competitiveness and generate agile solutions and value for all involved in the value system. Looking into the future this seminar will emphasise the importance ofnetwork competitiveness and how to maximise the benefits for all stakeholders. Smartness is the glue of interconnected and mutually beneficial systems and stakeholders and provides the infostructure for the value creation for all. Participants will be encouraged to consider how they can optimise their competitiveness based on optimising the performance of their networks in smart destinations and smart tourism and hospitality ecosystems.

Course leader

Professor Dimitrios Buhalis, Bournemouth University

Target group

PhD students, practitioners and business participants in tourism and hospitality.

Course aim

Understanding the basics in the subject area.