Data, digitalization, platforms, data spaces: What can be achieved in a tourism mobility ecosystem?

In the context of an increasingly digitized world, the tourism industry faces the dual challenge of meeting the expectations of digitally literate travellers while upholding principles of sustainability and responsibility. This presentation explores novel approaches and innovative solutions within the tourist service offering, emphasizing the integration of other service sectors—such as people transportation and local everyday services—to comprehensively address travellers’ needs. Leveraging digital tools, we propose a paradigm shift from fragmented information to harmonized open, tourism related, machine-readable data spaces to foster a creation of services that better fulfil tourist needs. By doing so, we create opportunities for destination stakeholders to organize themselves as interconnected ecosystems, collectively working toward the common well-being and enhancing overall destination income.

Rural areas, as sustainable tourist destinations, face distinct challenges compared to urban counterparts. Chief among these challenges is tourist mobility. Vast geographic distances, scattered attractions, and limited public and private mobility services —seasonal variations further compounding the complexity—pose obstacles for independent travellers (FITs) accessing destinations and navigating them sustainably. Advancing the digitalization of all the public transportation and other local transport means in the rural destinations, thus enabling advanced trip planners would be a big step towards a solution. Integration of advanced trip planning to data on tourist attractions and services as well as other data on local context could elevate tourist experience to the next level.

However, our study has shown that there are still multiple gaps and challenges in the digital service building related to the data availability and its quality, closed platforms, data silos, lacking or standards and interoperability. As a first step to mitigate the problems, we aim at harmonizing the digital representation of tourist services and attractions and combine that to standardized travel information to create intelligently integrated tourist mobility services that make destination information mobility-aware.