A Slovenian company awarded for their Tourism Impact Model tool

Tourism Innovation Summit 2020 took place from November 25-27 in Sevilla. It was meant to be a symbolic statement that despite the challenges of the current reality bound to COVID-19 such events can still be successfully accomplished. Arctur has once again proved the importance of the Tourism 4.0 initiative by receiving the award for The best innovation in the field of artificial intelligence and data analytics for the tool called TIM – Tourism Impact Model.

"The essence of Tourism 4.0 is the awareness that in addition to good food, friendly people and beautiful nature, tourism is ruled by other forces, namely high technology. The fact is that Europe has fallen asleep from that aspect and technology is in the hands of American corporations, "said Tomi Ilijaš, the CEO of Arctur.

Tourism 4.0 is the European answer and focuses on the quality of life of the locals, sustainable development of the environment and respect for personal privacy. There is a huge amount of data collected and stored in various ways. As such, however, the data have no value, they need to be converted into information which will give key decision-makers a good enough picture to help them take the right decision in which direction to develop tourism, infrastructure and other areas.

The team at Arctur, in the company of international experts, found that people's perceptions of the effects of tourism are often significantly different from the real situation. TIM is the first step on the path to change that. It is based on more than three hundred indicators to show the effects of tourism in a selected destination. It covers all areas of life and presents an objective picture of both, the positive and negative effects of tourism. Assessments with TIM are currently carried out as part of European projects led by Arctur at six destinations in the Black Sea area, 24 destinations in the Danube region and in 5 brave Slovenian municipalities that have joined already the testing phase and are just finishing data collecting.

"The opportunity for Slovenia is to use the tool for assessing the majority of the territory and become a reference country. Currently, we mostly make decisions based on data collected and processed by foreign corporations. Is this the future we want or do want to become owners of our data and the consequent decisions?” asked dr. Urška Starc Peceny.

Source: Tourism 4.0 Webpage

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