Distributed Trust & Reputation Models using Blockchain Technologies for Tourism Crowdsourcing Platforms

Crowdsourced repositories have become an increasingly important source of information for users and businesses in multiple domains. Everyday examples of tourism crowdsourcing platforms focusing on accommodation, food or travelling in general, influence consumer behaviour in modern societies. These repositories, due to their intrinsic openness, can strongly benefit from independent data quality modelling mechanisms. In this context, building trust & reputation models of contributors and storing crowdsourced data using distributed ledger technology allows not only to ascertain the quality of crowdsourced contributions, but also ensures the integrity of the built models. This paper presents a survey on distributed trust & reputation modelling using blockchain technology and, for the specific case of tourism crowdsourcing platforms, discusses the open research problems and identifies future lines of research.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An enabling framework for blockchain in tourism

This viewpoint article proposes an enabling framework that identifies the use of various blockchain technologies in tourism and their applications (digitalization, automation, disintermediation, and intelligent environment) across the different stages of travel (pre-trip, during the trip, and post-trip). As we know, the tourism sector contributes immensely to world GDP and job creation. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, even after two years since it first appeared, continues to adversely impact the tourism prospects of countries across the world due to nationwide lockdowns and travel restrictions. As the world tries to adapt to the “new normal,“ the tourism sector is forced to re-think its ways of doing business and bring about innovations to facilitate the new norms of contactless and safe transactions. Also, the sector, more than ever, need to effectively deal with its inherent challenges such as transparency and credibility of information, fraudulent practices, opportunistic behavior of intermediaries, and foreign currency risks. Blockchain technology can transform the tourism sector by offering innovative solutions that address its pressing issues. However, our current understanding of blockchain application in tourism is quite limited, with previous work being largely fragmented and narrow in terms of both scope and application. We foresee that the insights offered in this viewpoint, including the framework, will advance both theory and practice and facilitate the implementation of blockchain-enabled solutions across different travel stages

Co-creating a smart tourism local service system in rural areas: a case study from south

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementThe most recent trends show an increase in the urbanization of cities, and, consequently, inner territories become more depopulated, business activities get closed, services get reduced and the overall services become poor and not able to offer quality offers to visitors (Bolay, 2020). According to (United Nations, 2019), by 2050 more than three out of four people will be living in urban areas. Nowadays, many studies have addressed the evolution and features of Smart Cities (Van Dijk & Teuben, 2015) and tourism is also one of those spheres that got digitally transformed by Smart Cities (Khan, Woo, Nam, & Chathoth, 2017). One of the features of smart applications is the possibility to let the user be a driver of value in creating and sharing contents (Kontogianni & Alepis, 2020). However, the explosion of smart solutions enabled by the latest technological innovations has been mostly contextualized in urban environments while fewer solutions have been developed in less urbanized rural areas (Steyn & Johanson, 2010). The methodology used employs the merging of two of the core contemporary service research approaches: Service Science and Service-Dominant logic; the first offers an organizational framework to generate and integrate value co-creation in terms of a smart service systems (Polese, Botti, Grimaldi, Monta & Vesci, 2018). For the same purpose, but differently, the second proposes a different layout called service ecosystems (Vargo & Lusch, 2016). This combination of approaches overcomes individual model limitations by setting an integrated model that can be employed to hypercompetitive and experience-based sectors (Polese, Botti, Grimaldi, Monta & Vesci, 2018), and that was adopted by using a case study methodology, relying on semi-structured interviews

Turismo sustentável nos Açores: Uma visão sobre o que o smart tourism poderá oferecer à região

Desde o final do ano 2019 a região Autónoma dos Açores foi considerada como o primeiro arquipélago no mundo a se tornar sustentável, o que chamou a atenção do mercado turístico. Apesar deste aspeto positivo os Açores, principalmente a ilha de São Miguel tem tido alguns problemas no que diz respeito ao overtourism, alem de a região não disponibilizar dos seus próprios sistemas informáticos que possam contribuir para um turismo mais sustentável. Este estudo baseia-se no princípio da solução de poder identificar as tecnologias que que são exclusivas da região e fazer com que o turista as passe a utilizar ao visitar o local, encontrar novos sistemas tecnológicos que possam ser instalados na região no âmbito de promover um turismo mais sustentável, bem como criar um ecossistema de smart tourism baseado em outras tecnologias que já existam ou que estejam a ser desenvolvidas em outras regiões do mundo. Com o recurso de dez entrevistas realizadas a entidades públicas e privadas do sector turístico e da sustentabilidade na região foram recolhidos dados acerca dos sistemas que existem na região dos Açores bem como onde se investir para os melhorar, e a apresentar algumas tecnologias ligadas ao turismo e que foram identificadas a partir de artigos científicos em outras regiões no mundo, que poderão ter perante os pilares da sustentabilidade dos Açores, tendo como função ajudar a criar um futuro ecossistema de smart tourism na região.Since the end of 2019 the Autonomous Region of the Azores has been considered as the first archipelago in the world to become sustainable, which drew the attention of the tourism market. Despite this positive aspect, the Azores, mainly the island of São Miguel, has had some problems regarding overtourism, besides the region does not have its own IT systems that can contribute to a more sustainable tourism. This study is based on the solution principle of being able to identify the technologies that are unique to the region and making tourists use them when visiting the place, finding new technological systems that can be installed in the region in order to promote a more sustainable tourism, as well as creating a smart tourism ecosystem based on other technologies that already exist or that are being developed in other regions of the world. With the help of ten interviews conducted with public and private entities in the tourism and sustainability sector in the region, the information was collected about the systems that exist in the Azores region as well as where to invest to improve them and to present some technologies related to tourism, that were identified from scientific articles in other regions of the world, that may have a bearing on the pillars of sustainability in the Azores, which will help create a future ecosystem of smart tourism in the region