The digitization of the tourism sector is a new trend followed by several countries in order to increase the productivity and competitiveness of the tourism sector. EU member states such as Spain, but also countries such as China, have taken strong action in this area and play a leading role in the development of digital tourism.
What is achieved is the full utilization of systems based on big data and artificial intelligence. The benefits are obvious, mainly in the added value that personalization of products and services has, but also in the solution of several problems that plague frequent tourist areas from mass tourism.
The digitization of the tourism sector, among others, uses the GPS of users and measures in real time the congestion in the main attractions.
Businesses in tourism sector can take advantage of big data to discover new business segments in the tourist destination. Digitization helps tourist destination to carry out such a successful Big Data analysis projects. It predicts travel future demand for travel destinations.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Digital Transformation Initiative (DTI), from 2016 to 2025, digitalisation in aviation, travel and tourism is expected to create up to 305bn USD value for the industry through increased profitability, migrate 100 billion USD of value from traditional players to new competitors, and generate benefits valued at 700bn USD.
In 2016, for the sixth consecutive year the travel and tourism sector’s contribution to World GDP outpaced the global economy, rising to a total of 10.2% of World GDP (7,6trillion USD) (Data: World Travel & Tourism Council).
The UN World Tourism Organization projects that international tourist arrivals worldwide would grow at a rate of 3-4% each year after the end of pandemic Covid-19. With such steep demand for travel, further digitalisation will be vital if the expectations of tomorrow`s consumers are to be met.
