EU DigiTOUR

ended

The society and the world - business environment fully included - we live in today is digital. Organisations - regardless they are just beginners or digital evangelists - recognise the importance of digital tools and systems in helping their business running more efficiently and effectively, or the key role of the increasingly data-driven philosophies to be used for understanding customers and develop new strategies. Tourism market - and the travel and hospitality tourism - is all about digital potentials to be capitalised. According to Skift and AWS, ?there is no industry better positioned to capitalize on the benefits of digital-first processes than the travel and hospitality industry?. However despite the pandemic outbreak hit hard the tourism market, the adoption of digital tools and the understanding of their potentials is still inconsistent in the travel and hospitality sector, regardless the pace of transformation across its various business functions like marketing, operations, customer service, revenue management, and sales. To effectively support the digital transformation of EU tourism SMEs and to support in the recovery from the pandemic outbreak, the EU DigiTOUR project will design and deliver a transnational, cross-border and cross-ecosystem support scheme with the purpose to build the tourism SMEs capacity building in the field of digital transformation, overcoming the barriers in the adoption of key digital enabling techs, with a view to increase their business growth. The programme will have a specific focus on a few key, change-making, enabling digital techs for the tourism sector, in particular in the COVID-19 outbreak and recovery: AR/VR, IA, IoT, big data (business intelligence). The scope of the EU DigiTOUR is to support the paradigm shift in EU tourism SMEs still lagging behind in the digital transformation by building on capacity building, EU deep-tech startups support, cross-border cooperation and digital ecosystems empowerment.