Tourism as a sector relies heavily on ICT to guarantee its operations. As such, its competitiveness directly depends on the performance and innovation of its ICT provider, mostly SMEs. In the past few years, the Mediterranean tourism industry has increased in terms of quantity, but has suffered a loss of competitiveness due to the lack of investment in innovation and technology. As SMEs’ innovation capacity is limited due to their size, it is necessary to support creativity, innovation and R&D in ICT SMEs to achieve an increase of the overall competitiveness of the tourism industry. Only this way the tourism sector will operate a digital transformation to face its new challenges.

How Tech is Revolutionazing Tourism?

The Integration of Information Communications Technologies (ICT) plays a major role in the tourism industry and is essential for the success of its enterprises since ICT facilitates an individual’s access to information from anywhere any time and allows tourism enterprises to reach their targeted customer across the globe in a single click.

Due to the dominance of small and medium sized enterprises, the tourism industry displays special disadvantages in terms of innovation and product development: small businesses lack economies of scale and are not able to raise profit margins which could allow them to reinvest in research & development, market research, product development, skill or creativity enhancement.

Uncertainty and travelers’ anxiety will be the trademark of travel and tourism post COVID-19. The path to recovery for the industry across the world is innovation and increased competitiveness in the specific context of the modern world and only through innovation can competitiveness be retained. For countries around the world to promote the performance of the tourism sector, policymakers and stakeholders in the travel and tourism industry should give adequate attention to the improvement and integration of ICT. As such, the successful communication with customers-tourists eventully leads to the reduction of seasonality and the raise in reservations and sales in general.

The strategic goal is to integrate ICT, within the tourism sector, in a way that will enable more accessibility, visibility of information, availability of variety of products and satisfaction. Yet the recovery of tourism activities is not an end in itself. The pandemic revealed structural shortcomings in the tourism sector and e-tourism will essentially lead the digitalization of the whole touristic industry and its infrastructure.

In Palestine, thanks to the Med Pearls project they are providing suport to SMEs to be able to do the needed digital transformation.