The Spanish tourism sector, one of the world’s leading tourism sectors, is facing a delicate situation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, urgent action is needed to improve competitiveness and address the major transformations pending when it comes to sustainability and digitalization.
The digital transformation of the tourism sector is key to attracting increasingly hyper-connected tourists, and with higher added-value stays, and can serve to drive innovation in the sector, facilitate accessibility and improve the governance of destinations.
To achieve this transformation, the actions contemplated in the Digital Transformation Plan for Tourist Destinations will be implemented, which aim to develop new tools for the Network of Smart Tourist Destinations. Among them, a modular platform will be created to allow all tourism agents to interact with tourists in a digital, intelligent, and scalable way, allowing the progressive development of new shared solutions.
A Tourism Intelligence System (SIT) will also be developed, which will integrate all sources of tourism information in Spain, providing advanced analytical services, fundamental for both tourism administrations and companies in their decision-making.
In addition, actions aimed at the digital transformation of companies in the tourism value chain will be implemented through artificial intelligence and other enabling technologies. These actions include the development of an industrial data space for the tourism sector, which aims to enable companies to share information securely in order to improve the offer and to develop new products and services based on the strategic use and analysis of data.
On the other hand, the development of a public-private collaborative environment in the style of an “app store” will also be promoted, with segmented digital solutions for the different companies in the sector, in which digital solutions oriented to the tourism sector will be developed on open source.
This will be complemented with the following calls of the “last mile” program aimed at companies, preferably SMEs and associations or associated entities of the sector, linked to innovation processes directly related to the uniqueness of the offer of each company.
