Tailortour: Dynamic commercial tailor-made systems for tourist services as roadmap for integrating sustainability patterns

The project aims at the development of a dynamic, automated and inter-connected system able to create, evaluate, commercialize and connect from a local perspective the different sustainable tourism products/services of low environmental and high social and cultural impact. We propose tailor-made solutions for their re-design in terms of their sustainability evaluation, and the creation of a direct channel between the destination management companies and the final clients.
Small and medium sized companies need to ensure an ever growing and exigent clientelle that they are making a responsible purchase. The actual market tools do not cover the necessity of integrating the demand for sustainability as any other commercial factor contributing to the tourist’s decision-making process. On the other hand, tourist destinations need to maximize the positive impacts of the tourism activity. Today, local tourist operators in the destination have to face a high pressure from competitive global distributors and their external commercialization model. However, it is these local tourist operators who are the best providers of local tourist information and who can best evaluate the impact of tourism in the destination. Their difficulty in offering the right product to the right tourist at the right time leads to a loss of their community building capacity and their role in the value chain. This difficulty is fomented by the lack of mechanisms to constantly update and re-design their sustainable products according to a valid demand, and thus offer an added value service, an important asset when competing with large, far-reaching and resourceful European and global competitors.

The project aims at empowering, assisting, accompanying and upgrading tourist operators and services suppliers in the destination in the process of creation, commercialization, and re-design of their offer of sustainable tourism products. The project will focus on the creation of a commercialization assistant that would connect the different sustainable tourism platforms of the involved SMEs. This would be a high-fidelity tool for the direct commercialization of sustainable tourism products/services, ensuring the quality of the information coming from first hand sources, such as tourism operators and tourist suppliers, raising awareness on local resources, increasing their participation and competitiveness in the tourist value chain, and ensuring a more accurate measurement of the impact of the tourism activity in the destination.

The main benefits of the system consist in transferring the commercialization of destinations to local enterprises, enabling tourist SMEs to answer correctly to the demand for sustainable tourist products, promote a highly personalized offer, and taking the step from sustainability indicators to applied evaluations that guide the tourist through the election process, help travel more sustainably and match the sustainability aspects he/she values with the theoretical concepts of sustainability. Another benefit is that it allows diagnosis results and thus gives rise to tailor-made improvement proposals for the products/services offered.

The project aims at increasing the involvement and role of local operators as direct tourist suppliers, allowing the destination to obtain great economic and social benefits. Maximum value would be thus given to the local products and services related to the local economy and culture, and leading to the increase of multiplying effects of the tourism activity. Businesses owned and run by local people, who hire local employees help minimize economic leakages, as the benefits generated are kept into the destination community.

The project also contributes to the decrease of seasonality, creating synergies between products and destinations, as it encourages networking at European level and addresses to a demanding sector that highly values an offer which, enriched with all the destination alternatives, shifts from the seasonal type to a multi-disciplinary one. In terms of social impact, the project proposes the creation of specialized jobs in the destination and a better qualification of these, due to the specialization and the new requirements imposed by the proposed ICT tools, and also contributes to the community capacity building. The tourist operators who apply sustainable management and create and deliver responsible products have the opportunity to have their offer positively evaluated and thus be rewarded for their efforts and consolidate their position in the market as sustainable providers.

artificial intelligence
sustainable tourism
user interfaces
social media
GIS geographical information systems
customization
multiple devices
databases management
tourism

Tourism research and training institute based in UK.

Tourism-technology oriented SME from Spain. 

2 technological SMEs from Greece and Italy.