On 26 June 2020, the NEST project launched a series of webinars aimed at highlighting digital solutions to favour the recovery of the Tourism sector.
The Covid-19 outbreak has forced everyone to deep into the digital world.
Digital disruption and transformation are greatly influencing interactions both at the individual and organisational levels, requiring a rethinking and re-imagination of tourism operations, productivity and approaches. To recover from the crisis, the tourism sector is called to find flexible and innovative ways to build its resilience, including using digital technologies to help mitigate the effects of health-related risks.
The NEST Project decided to contribute in stimulating such process, by organising a series of free webinars with acknowledged professors and experts from the academic and business world that will provide the NEST community with essential knowledge, tools and tips for embracing digital tourism and for creating smart tourism destinations.
The first webinar was held on 26th June, moderated by Professor Valentina Ndou, University of Salento, and saw the participation of Professor Rodolfo Baggio of the Bocconi University of Milan. The webinar focused on “New technologies to address the post-Covid recovery in the tourism sector”.
According to Professor Baggio, in order to grasp the opportunities offered by the technologies as well as to benefit from the new competencies and skills for innovation, tourism SMEs should collaborate, cooperate and create systems. In particular, tourism stakeholders are highly required to re-engineer their operation in order to introduce contactless services (as applied to check-in, check-out, room keys, mobile payments, bookings-purchases), in-room technologies, virtual experiences (museums, attractions, destinations), robots to deal with tourism services (food delivery, museum guides), digital payments etc.
To re-watch the webinar, visit the NEST Facebook page.
Finding viable solutions to help the tourism sector mitigate the short-term and long-term drawbacks of the Covid-19 crisis is one of the priorities of the EU as well as of the Interreg Italy-Albania-Montenegro Programme.
The NEST project will continue organising webinars covering several different aspects of the digitization and innovation of the tourism sector in the next weeks. It also will try and contribute to the international discourse about the impact of Covid-19 on the tourism sector, by collaborating with other initiatives and stakeholders in the Italy-Albania-Montenegro cooperation area and beyond.
