Some 25 Years of eTourism€¦ · Many technologies rely on digital to reproduce a wave (a sound or a light wave) that was originally analogue. page 11 A modem, as those currently

IT for TourismServices, UniBg2020-2021

Some 25 Years of eTourism

image credit to Caped Coaching

Some 25 Years of eTourism. Lecture 01

IT for TourismServices, UniBg2020-2021IT for TourismServices, UniBg2020-2021

What Are We Talking About Today?

Some 25 Years of eTourism. Lecture 01 page 2

1. IT & Digital2. IT & Tourism3. More Needs4. Experience5. The Industry And DMOs6. Social, Mobile & Big Data7. Our Calendar This Year

image credit

to Travelers.com


Preconditions to These Lectures


These lectures’ syllabus, as published on the website of the University of Bergamo, requires that you fulfill some preconditions. Here they are.

▪English proficiency; systematic use of e-mail, web navigation, socialnetworking, and mobile communication; willingness to keep in touch on a professional level through social networks and/or e-learning platforms.

▪Recognizing the technical nature of web navigation: basic understanding of operating systems, communication protocols among computers, and the html.

Therefore, these lectures are taking your awareness of operating systems, communication protocols among computers, and the html, as granted.


IT & Digital


These lectures are entitled IT for Tourism Services.

IT stands for Information Technology, which is the use of computers to store, retrieve, transmit, and manipulate data, or information. IT is considered to be a subset of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).

All data that a computer processes must be encoded digitally.

The words above are quoted from the English – i .e. global – edition of Wikipedia.Though Wikipedia cannot be considered an academic source, your lecturer strongly believes its global edition can be quoted in an academic environment as reasonably as the Encyclopedia Britannica or any other fact-checked source, the authors of which are published.


What Is Digital?

Digital derives from the Latin word Digitus, meaning finger.In short, digital is what can be represented with numbers, which can be counted with fingers.Digital is opposed to analogue (analog, in the USA) which is related to what is not countable: what cannot be considered within a discrete set of elements.

page 5Some 25 Years of eTourism. Lecture 01


A Real Wave, and a Digital Wave

page 6

The MP3 lossy compression works by reducing (or approximating) the accuracy of certain parts of a continuous sound that are considered to be beyond the auditory resolution ability of most people.

This method is referred to as perceptual coding. It uses psychoacoustic models to discard or reduce precision of components less audible to human hearing.

Source: Wikipedia



A Cello vs. an iPod


image credit to 30cc


Mechanical vs. Digital Watches

A mechanical watch is analogue inasmuch as the positionof each of its three hands (hours, minutes and seconds) can represent any of the infinite points forming the circle of the watch itself – points that cannot be numbered.

page 8

In a digital watch, instead, only the figures which make up hours, minutes and seconds are usually represented – only the 86,400 moments (24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds) making up the seconds of a day.


image credits

to Bespoke , Amazon


Painting, Photographs, and Pixels

An oil on canvas painting, or a watercolour, or a traditional photograph (a photograph based on a chemical film) consists of an infinite number of points in an infinite range of colours.A painting or a chemical photograph can be digitized (scanned, for instance) and translated into a digital photo where its surface is represented as divided into a discrete number of “points” (usually small squares called pixels).Each pixel reproduces only one colour in an available range of 16,777,216 (a combination of 256 shades of red, 256 of green and 256 of blue – according to the widely used RGB colour model).



Another Way to Digitalize Images

Note, however, that there’s another approach to digital images.Beyond pixel “squares”, digital graphic can be designed and managed through vectors.Portions of space are defined by Bézier curves.

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image credits to thewindowsclub, nepero.net



Waves and Bits


Many technologies rely on digital to reproduce a wave (a sound or a light wave) that was originally analogue.

page 11

A modem, as those currently used for ADSL connections,converts an analogue sound signal that can be sent through telephone wires into a digital signal, of the sort requested by computers or other electronic devices working by bits(1/0).

(By the way, ADSL stands for

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line)


Bits vs. Bytes


A bit (a binary digit) is the basic unit of information in computing;it is the amount of information stored by a digital device or other physical system that exists in one of two possible distinct states.These may be the two stable states of a flip-flop, two positions of an electrical switch, two distinct voltage or current levels allowed by a circuit, two distinct levels of light intensity, two directions of magnetization or polarization, etc.

The byte, instead, is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications, that most commonly consists of eight bits.Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the basic addressable element in many computer architectures.

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1/0

Yes/No

True/False

This is called a Boolean Data Type.


ASCII Characters


Every time a computer deals with a character, it deals in fact with a Boolean string of eight 1/0.


Digital Is a Revolution, of Course


Socially relevant consequences of being digital include▪ Information and Communication Technologies (ADSL, broadband, Wi-Fi...)▪ Information sharing (the Internet, the Web, mobile phones...)▪E-mail and Social Networking posts (sent and received through the Internet)▪Sharing of music and videos (Mp3, iTunes...)Digital has changed our lives. Nonetheless, digital is innerly poorer than analogue inasmuch as it conveys a simplified message.

(This, by the way, may imply that digital communication is invariably poorer than personal communication.Let’s not forget it, when communicating through the Internet.)


Communicating In Person

The best way to communicate is meeting someone in person.It’s the real thing – uncountable and, if you want, analogue.

▪When you call her/him through a videophone (or VoIP, like Skype), you miss at least the physical context around her/him.▪When you call her/him on the phone, you miss the physical context, and you don’t see her/him.▪When you send her/him an e-mail message, you miss the physical context, you don’t see her/him, and you don’t know when and where she/he will read.



Digital Communication

▪When you send her/him a text message, you miss the physical context, you don’t see her/him, you don’t know when and where she/he will read, and you must keep it short.▪When post something on the Web, you miss the physical context, you don’t see your audience, you don’t know when and where your audience will read, you must keep it short, and you don’t know – or will know little of – your audience.

page 16

Let’s not forget all this, when communicating through the Internet!



Digital Is “poor”, Yet Very Powerful

We should not, however, forget the great power of digital.

▪ “Poor” communication and relationships –Facebook “friends” are not necessarily friends – are paralleled by an enormous quantitative increase in communication, relationships, and social influence.

▪ Fake news, for instance, are very powerful.

We talk less, but can talk to many more people. And can do many more things.

image credit to Mashable



For Instance... Picture from the 2019-2020 Workshop


Last spring your

colleagues were so

good to produce

on-the-spot

multimedia

content on a

destination they

couldn’t visit!


The Val Tartano Workshop, 2nd Edition Some 25 Years of eTourism. Lecture 01 page 19

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmCWM0RitlhTkejxh8zax1A/featured

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmCWM0RitlhTkejxh8zax1A/featured


“Being digital” as a 1995 Book

“I am optimistic by nature. However, every technology or gift of science has a dark side. Being digital is no exception.The next decade [1995-2005] will see cases of intellectual-property abuse and invasion of our privacy. We will experience digital vandalism, software piracy, and data thievery.Worst of all, we will witness the loss of many jobs. […]It is here. It is now. It is almost genetic in its nature, in that each generation will become more digital than the preceding one.The control bits of that digital future are more than ever before in the hands of the young. Nothing could make me happier.”

— Nicholas Negroponte, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)



Coding

How does digital work? It’s not simply a matter of reducing things into bits and bytes.It’s also a matter of making machines to operate. This is done by coding.Coded instructions given to machines in order to make them process operations are called algorithms.Let’s quote Wikipedia again.


image credit to Rowan Simpson


Algorithms According to Wikipedia

“In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is an unambiguousspecification of how to solve a class of problems.Algorithms can perform calculation, data processing and automated reasoning tasks. As an effective method, an algorithm can be expressed within a finite amount of space and time and in a well-defined formal language for calculating a function.Starting from an initial state and initial input (perhaps empty), the instructions describe a computation that, when executed, proceeds through a finite number of well-defined successive states, eventually producing ‘output’ and terminating at a final ending state.”



Can Digital Machinery Learn?

Machines can be instructed not simply to produce outputs.They can also be instructed to mimic human intelligence, processing pieces of information in a way replicated from human intelligence but much faster.This is generically called the Artificial Intelligence (AI).For example, when Facebook provides you with advertisement based on what you looked at beforehand, or Google delivers answers to your searches which are based on the pages you previously visited, these are instances of AI.Facebook and Google have learnt from your previous behaviour on the Net.Their algorythms have been coded to make you see first – or only – content that is closer to all that Facebook or Google have recorded you did before.



Machines Learn

image credit to Genetic Literacy Project



Digital, Market Capitalization 2016

As early as in August 2016 the three biggestcompanies in the world belonged to the Information Technologysector.

Source: The Economist



Digital, Market Capitalization 2019

The diagram from The Economist is particularly clear.

More recent data, although not split between digital and non digital, confirm the trend.

Source: Boston Consulting


digital


Digital, Share Prices, Power


About an year after the diagram by The Economist, similar conclusions could be drawn in terms of share pricesand their rise.

Source: Financial Times


Digital, Share Prices, Power, 2020


Please find the same values as on September 21, 2020.

Source: Financial Times

and the author from NASDAQ


A Warning, Just In Case


One point should be underlined, just in case.By no way your lecturer means that numbers are poor – or even dangerous.On the contrary, numbers are a fundamental component of science, which is essential for any possible ability to understand reality.Only consider that any attempt to code reality in Boolean terms is not the same thing as reality.E.g. fake news have nothing to do with science, exactly like they have nothing to do with reality. A pixeled Galileo, by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei


IT & Tourism

The digital revolution and the Information Technologies(IT) have had a strong impact on tourism.Traditional tour operators, like TUI or Carlson, and travel retailers no longer dominate the tourist market.Some call this process disintermediation.This means that today Travel Providers – like Air France, Deutsche Bahn, or Accor – can sell their tourist services and products directly to final customers, and no longer need traditional agents like tour operators, travel retailers or ticket offices.



This is true, but it’s not only a matter of disintermediation...Actually, Online Travel Agents (OTAs, or OLTAs) like Booking.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor and Airbnb do not simply “disintermediate”.They now run a different sort of intermediation between Travel Producers and final customers.Big OTAs like Booking.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor and Airbnb – though springing from diverse stories, and adopting diverse models – have now all succeeded in taking the place of traditional tour operators and travel retailers.

Online Travel Agents



Travel Providers vs. Travel Agents

A distinction should always be made between travel providers and travel agents.

✓ Travel providers provide travel products.

✓ Travel providers can sell through the Webthe products they produce.

o Travel agents do not provide travel products.

o Travel agents can only sell through the Web someone else’s travel products.



Ok, But The Places?

This course, however, does not deal with the tourist industry only.It mainly deals with tourists, tourist places, and the people who inhabit tourist


image credit to infinityimmigration.com, BC, Canada

places: the locals.

A fundamental role in tourism is performed by the way in which locals organize tourism.

Local organizations which organize tourism are called Destination Management Organizations (DMOs).


Digital technologies have paved the way to interesting and appealing new ways of selling tourist services, products and places directly to final customers.One of the first has been the so-called Last Minute, which offer late travel deals.

Appealing Technologies

Another is Dynamic Packaging – often connected with Recommendation Systems – which allows customers to build their own travel itineraries by consulting recommendations from previous tourists and assembling services accordingly.


image credit to Depositphotos

image credit to bug-software.com


Digital Has Invaded Tourism

This innovation process is fast and still ongoing, and we really don’t know which new technologies will affect the tourism world in the future.Recent instances have been Uber and Airbnb,two Disruptors which now drive the market, but began operations only nine or ten years ago.Tourism has come to be considered a leading innovation field, which an aggressive industry platform like Skift has prioritized. Some Skift slides follow.



Skifthistory 1



Skifthistory 2



Skifthistory 3



More Needs

On the other hand, digital has allowed tourists to▪decide more consciously where to go▪know more about places to be visited▪ask more needs to be fulfilled by tourist operators.Technological evolutions, in fact, have been relevant not only to tourist operators.Quite the opposite: the attitude of travelers’ behaviour has changed considerably, too.Today, tourists need a range of information before, during and after their travel experience – and they share this information!

image credit to Travelers.com



Before, During & After

Today trips are not only planned before departure, but also▪constantly modified, transformed and remodeled duringthe experience, due to▪stimuli arising from the trip itself as well as thanks to recommendations of other tourists who had similar experiences in the same destination, while▪data gathered during the trip, like photos and comments posted, help remembering and rethinking afterwards.

Tourist destinations can now cooperate in a co-creation of tourist experience.



Experience

A factor to be considered is the experiential nature of the tourism product – as research by Pine & Gilmore have begun underlining since 1999.When tourists travel, as well as when they get back from a trip, they tend to share their experience with family and friends, as partakers during the holiday.This is why communication practices such as word of mouth and recommendations have been successful in tourism communication even before the Internet arrived.The keyword for this process is User Generated Content (UGC).



TripAdvisor

The first website to take off thanks to the eWord of Mouth(eWOM) – and actually the very first platform to gather User Generated Content on a mass scale – was TripAdvisor.

Although it has been turned into something very close to an Online Travel Agent in recent years, TripAdvisor was born in February 2000 as a tourist community.


As its founders said, “We started as a site where we were focused more on those official words from guidebooks or newspapers or magazines.We also had a button in the very beginning that said, ‘Visitors, add your own review’, and pretty soon the number of average consumer reviews far surpassed the number of ‘professional reviews’.”


The Industry and DMOs

As we saw from the Skifthistory, IT and tourism have long been parallel and rapidly growing phenomena.

page 43

▪ The tourism industry began using IT to improve transportation, intermediation and hospitality shortly after WW2. Those were the years when Computer Reservations Systems (CRS) – later Global Distribution Systems (GDS), like Sabre and Amadeus – were born.▪ Then the Internet era fully started (1991-2002), and both the industry and Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) began developing websites, in order to communicate smoothly with their potential customers.


image credit to hotelseye


Customer Care & Support


▪ In 1991-2002 DMOs involved local actors – or , rather, tried to involve local actors... – by centralizing and distributing tourist information and services from various partners in their own destinations’ territories.▪ However, during the following decades of the Internet era (from 2002) the change has been more radical.Operators and DMOs have shifted from creating technological artifacts, like websites, to customer care and increased support to the tourists’ decision-making process.

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As already observed, destinations can now try co-creating the tourist experience.


Social Media


We can say that four relatively recent developmentsrelated to the rise of the Information and Communication Technologies have contributed and are still contributing to the shift.

page 45

1. The so-called Web 2.0 and social networking platforms –like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, as well as communities like Flickr, YouTube, or TripAdvisor itself – have turned the attention of tourist operators and destinations (or, actually, some of them...) to a better interaction with tourists.


Mobile, GPS, and Broadband


2. Mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) have emerged and consolidated on a global scale, making high computing power and constant connectivity available to a wider audience. Obviously, users take advantage of these opportunities during their travel experience, too.

3. Moreover, smartphones now “know” where their owners are located, thanks to the Global Positioning System (GPS).

4. In addition, these current decades of the Internet era have witnessed the expansion of high-speed connections, or broadband – though broadband is far from being diffused.

page 46


Social as the Default State


The social networking trend was identified (and denounced) by Andrew Keen as early as in 2012.

In his book #digitalvertigo he wrote that

“The social has become the default setting of the Internet.”

Now, social networking has combined with the diffusion of smartphones and the spreading of broadbandcommunication – increasingly released through Wi-Fi connectivity – to the point that the basic situation to be considered by DMOs and tourism managers is mobile social.

page 47


Networks & Big Data

Social networking platforms, smartphones, GPS and wi-fi combine to generate huge sets of data. They are what we’ve become accustomed to refer to as Big Data.

Big or small that they can be, these “big data” are not homogeneous, and have different owners.

Yet they can – theoretically, at least – be gathered, analysed, processed by AI, and used.Big Data can be used by tourism managers – like you, too, may be in the future – to understand how users behave, try co-creating their experience, and influence them to buy.

Source: Google



Today’s Key Points


1. Digital Is Poorer Than Reality2. Digital Is Very Powerful3. Digital Has Invaded Tourism4. Tourists’ Needs Have Increased5. Social Is The Default State6. Mobile Is The Basic Situation7. ‘‘Big Data’’ Can/Must Be Used

image credit to 30cc


Our Program This Year

Ok. This is enough, for our first meeting.

Now, let’s consider how and when we will deal with all this before Christmas.

▪ Networks and Social Networks: Web Presence▪ Mobile communication and Geopositioning▪ Data Analysis and Web Reputation▪ Design: Content and Usability▪ Quality and Quality Evaluation▪ Big-Bang Disruptions and AI▪ YOU

October

November

December> Your delivery of quality evaluations



Now a Calendar In Detail

Lecture 01

Some25 Yearsof eTourism

Lecture 02

Networks& Social Networks. Web Presence

Lecture 04

Mobile, Smartphones, Wi-Fi, and Apps

Lecture 03

Destinations,the Industry,and Peer-To-Peer

Lecture 06

Web Reputation: Likes, Engagement & Sentiment

Lecture 05

Analytics, Insights, Cookies, and the Disappearing Privacy

Lecture 07

Design: Content, Copyright& Creative Commons



Approaching The Assessment

Lecture 08

Design: Usability, Gamification, Augmented & Virtual Reality

Lecture 09

Quality, Standards,Models & Meta-Models. The 7Loci

Lecture 11

Web PresenceQuality Reporting

Lecture 12

Disruptions and Tourism,AI, Covid-19

Lecture 13

Your reports: 1st and2nd groups

Lecture 14

Your reports: 3rd and4th groups

Lecture 15

Your reports: more groups

Lecture 10

Web Presence.A 7Loci Evaluation Model



Thanks For Your Attention


Picture from the 2017-2018 Course

Documents

Some 25 Years of eTourism€¦ · Many technologies rely on digital to reproduce a wave (a sound or a light wave) that was originally analogue. page 11 A modem, as those currently