فن آوری و استراتژی های نوآوری برای گردشگری مبتنی بر تجربه

Tourism is undergoing significant change and facing new challenges—that call for new perspectives. At least two dimensions of the change can be identified: • new forms of tourism, characterized by the tendency to depart from mass tourism; • the diffusion of information and communication technologies, with a pervasive effect on the creation, production and consumption of the tourist product. The limited success of most attempts to exploit produced windows of opportunity indicates that we are facing a pre-paradigmatic phase of transition. Innovative attempts gain new strategic value when viewed from a perspective that values experience as an important new attribute. Such a perspective has significant consequences for the growth of destination strategies, policies, and the integration of the information-society dimension.

Being part of the service sector, tourism has inevitably been associated with developments in new technologies and refreshed by organizational and structural innovations. There has been a trend to flexibilization of the tourist product by a form of customization, despite the pressure from tourist operators who still advocate packages of mass tourism. The trends towards ‘advanced’ facets of the service ‘post-industrial’ (information) society—customization, flexibilization—render knowledge the new decisive competitiveness factor. Inescapably, this leads to the consideration of learning as a dynamic capability. In the competitive landscape of tourism, any location or business aiming to do better than others, should become either a learning region or a learning industry. Even more, emerging alternative tourism has to engage the element of culture, which gains in importance and has to be continuously transformed. Thus, a principal dimension of innovation in ‘new tourism’ emerges along the culture—knowledge dipole. However, the main effort for change in tourism (both on policy and management) has concentrated until now on the exploitation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in a defensive manner and with limited transformative effect, as a means for cost cutting and accelerating transactions and information exchange. Two core questions emerge: first how can culture, knowledge and innovation foster new tourism? And second, how might this be related to new technology? Recent changes in the tourist industry are summarized in Section 2, stressing the fact that new forms of tourism gradually emerge in the place of conventional tourism. In Section 3, it is demonstrated that ICT-based innovation may have sustainable competitive effect only when it is integrated within a knowledge-creating strategy, focused on the accumulation of intelligence on tourists, destinations and providers. Section 4 suggests that the emergence of new tourism—as well as innovation in the tourist product itself—can be considered under a new framework of analysis that distinguishes experience as a distinct value attribute. The implications of this approach for the understanding of production, restructuring and change in tourism are outlined in Section 5. In Section 6, suggestions are put forward for the development of experience-focused strategies and the opportunities emerging for the exploitation of ICTs. The paper concludes suggesting that the articulation of experience-staging strategies may generate new windows of opportunity for the creation of interactive learning processes that take advantage of ICTs in a way that is substantially beneficial for destinations.

The ICTs embody a wide range of opportunities and challenges for all players across the tourism value chain. The main trends until now show that, across this value chain, the major investments have been made in the direction of re-engineering information transactions. Success in this field has been closely associated with the development of user-related intelligence. Intermediaries have proved more successful than providers in the accumulation of such intelligence. Consequently, they have responded successfully to the threat of disintermediation. In general, the tourism industry—despite being a service industry—is characterized by the tangible nature of the sources of competitiveness (4Ss, nature, etc.) within it. The digitalization of transactions has been the least tangible facet of the tourism value chain. This is more pertinent to up-and-coming destinations. In this respect, the tourist industry has yet to realize distinctive strategies with respect to the emerging knowledge economy. There is a mismatch between the tangible nature of conventional sources of competitiveness and the intangibility associated with the information and knowledge society. The shift of orientation towards an experience-centered tourism strategy provides opportunities for such a perspective. The Table 1 summarizes the main differences between endowment-based (conventional or alternative) and experience-based tourism. The accumulated knowledge from interaction with tourists can be incorporated in intelligence. This intelligence is destination-specific and user-oriented, thus providing an intangible (and so less replicable) source of competitive advantage. More accurately, culture becomes a central element of value production in a dynamic interactive way. At the same time, such a strategy generates opportunities for new ‘cyber-spaces’ of interaction along the four realms of experience. Thus, it provides a favorable setting for the successful interaction of destinations and tourists in a direct way (with less intermediation), exploiting the potential of an e-learning economy.