The Strategic Role of ICTs in Tourism in Developing Countries

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become pervasive in all industries contributing substantially to the growth of businesses. In developed contexts, the pervasive and transformational power of ICTs has been leveraged to the benefit of Hospitality and tourism sectors. Despite the remarkable social impact and business offerings made possible by ICTs, limited research exists regarding the influence of ICT on tourism especially in the context of developing countries. In this study, we explore the impact of ICT on tourism from the customers’ perspective, employee productivity and services offered by hotels in a developing country. Using a quantitative case study, we examined ICT intensity of use, availability and incidence of use index across model hotels that leveraged ICTs. The findings revealed that ICT incidence of use had a significant positive impact on tourism as well as a strong positive relationship with both customer satisfaction and operational productivity in the hotels. Our study provides insight for researchers and practitioners to consider further investigations into the impacts of service quality and innovation, as well as the effect of discount pricing, innovative products and services. Keywords: ICT, Hospitality, Tourism, Developing Countries, Innovation, Service Quality

Assessing regional digital competence: Digital futures and strategic planning implications

Understanding strategic decisions aimed at addressing regional economic issues is of increasing interest among scholars and policy makers today. Thus, studies that proffer effective strategies to address digital futures concerns from social and policy perspectives are timely. In light of this, this research uses strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis tool to frame a regional strategy for digital futures to enhance place-specific digital connectivity and socio-economic progress. Focus group discussions and a structured questionnaire were conducted to examine a SWOT for a digital economy strategy in the Southern Downs Region in Queensland, Australia. The findings show that while the proposed regional strategies for digital futures are susceptible to internal and external forces, strategic planning makes them manageable. The study’s findings also reveal that adaptive strategic planning can help regulate the effects of internal and external factors that shape individual and organisational responses to digital transformation, and that these factors promote regional competitiveness

Application of communication technologies (ICT) within the tourism industry in the European Union

The information and communication technologies (ICT) are revolutionizing the tourism industry. This research note will make a brief diagnosis of the relationships between tourism and ICT in the European context by presenting an index to characterize the digitization of the tourism sector and its comparison with a reference index, which reflects the introduction of the ICT in every country. The proposed indicator will allow us to know the degree of integration of these ICT in EU countries when talking about tourism accommodation reservations. The results indicate divergent behavior patterns in digital accommodation management and in how ICTs are managed, as well as a different perception of trends between different geographical areas of the European Union. From the comparative analysis of the indicators, we can observe that in the South of Europe/Mediterranean area both the tourism integration and ICT are quite commonly below the European results. In other countries like Holland and Spain, the traditional channels are still used despite of their outstanding digitalization. These patterns provide relevant insights for the companies, especially for the tourism agencies, and allow establishing sector needs within the digital field

Smart Tourism Destinations: Can the Destination Management Organizations Exploit Benefits of the ICTs? Evidences from a Multiple Case Study

Recent developments of ICTs enable new ways to experience tourism and conducted to the concept of smart tourism. The adoption of cutting-edge technologies and its combination with innovative organizational models fosters cooperation, knowledge sharing, and open innovation among service providers in tourism destination. Moreover, it offers innovative services to visitors. In few words, they become smart tourism destinations. In this paper, we report first results of the SMARTCAL project aimed at conceiving a digital platform assisting Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) in providing smart tourism services. A DMO is the organization charged with managing the tourism offer of a collaborative network, made up of service providers acting in a destination. In this paper, we adopted a multiple case studies approach to analyze five Italian DMOs. Our aims were to investigate (1) if, and how, successful DMOs were able to offer smart tourism services to visitors; (2) if the ICTs adoption level was related to the collaboration level among DMO partners. First results highlighted that use of smart technologies was still in an embryonic stage of development, and it did not depend from collaboration levels

Emerging Technologies: Implications for the Nepalese Tourism Industry

This paper intends to present the potential technologies for sustainable tourism development and promotion of Nepal. Based on secondary literature, various emerging technologies that help to reduce manual works, maximize productivity and ensure the physical security of entities have been explored in the paper. Similarly, some challenges of technological interventions and needful steps to overcome the obstacles are also illustrated. Moreover, this paper also addresses the impacts of the prevailing COVID- 19 crisis on tourism in Nepal and puts forward the needful suggestions to mitigate the crisis. It is hoped that this paper can be a reference to scholars, tourism stakeholders, and policymakers as it delivers plentiful information on the potentialities and feasibilities of ICT implementation in Nepal

Digital Infrastructure: Overcoming the digital divide in China and the European Union. CEPS Research Report, November 2017

This study is the result of collaboration among a group of researchers from CEPS and Zhejiang University (ZJU), who decided to team up and analyse the experience of China and the EU in bridging the digital divide. While acknowledging that both China and Europe have undertaken major efforts to reduce socio-economic and geographical disparities by providing network access to ever more citizens, the authors found that investing in physical access alone is not sufficient to enhance inclusion in the information society. They argue that public authorities should also adopt corollary policies to spur social and economic cohesion through innovations that enable disadvantaged regions to catch up with more developed urban areas. In this context, the report calls upon governments to promote digital innovation and entrepreneurship, foster coordinated efforts and adapt their educational systems to the changing labour market

Assessment of China’s Macro-Readiness for Integrated Innovative Management Technologies Employment

Introduction. Economic entities should constantly apply various forms of innovation, including managerial and organizational innovations, to ensure the processes of developing and acquiring adaptive capacity. One of these innovations is integrated management technologies covering several interacting heterogeneous technological, economic, organizational, social, and psychological processes or several management functions. Aim and tasks. The study aims to elaborate a procedure for assessing a country’s macro-readiness to apply integrated innovative management technologies and qualitatively characterise its level. Results. An assessment of macro-readiness to apply integrated innovative management technologies was conducted using the case of China. In order to obtain a generalized evaluation of the country’s macro-readiness to apply integrated innovative management technologies, synthetic taxonomic indicators based on readiness components and a general synthetic indicator were generated. The synthetic human capital and research indicator changed from low (0.243) in 2016 to high (0.647) in 2020. The same trend is inherent in the synthetic indicator of ICT availability and use, which increased from 0.367 to 0.920, and in the synthetic indicator of institutional and business environment, which increased from 0.310 to 0.876. Although it has improved from 0.205 to 0.451, the synthetic indicators of financial resources and development have not yet reached a high level. Conclusion. The suggested procedure for assessing macro-readiness to apply integrated innovative management technologies is based on constructing a synthetic indicator of readiness, combining the taxonomic indicators of human, digital, financial, and institutional readiness. This procedure, implying the determination of their qualitative levels, enables us to determine a country’s readiness to support business entities’ adoption of new management technologies. The assessment of China's readiness for applying integrated innovative management technologies using the developed approach revealed that the ICT component is the best developed, while the financial component is the most underdeveloped

LEVERAGING E-GOVERNMENT FOR CITY TRANSFORMATION: A CASE STUDY OF DIGITAL WUYI

Seeing the scarcity of successful e-government programs in developing countries while a high failure rate reported on the opposite, this study investigates the success of \u27Digital Wuyi\u27 program in China. This study exhibits its ten-year roadmap in which the e-government has been continuously upgraded at a municipal level, spanning from e-government infrastructure and platform development, community informatization with rural priority, e-commerce development for pillar industry, to Internet of Things development. Further, this study identifies the key success factors and reflects the corresponding practices that lead Wuyishan City to achieve the success in e-government development. We find that sustainable and dynamic strategic planning, mayor\u27s leadership with entrepreneurships spirits and action learning, public-private partnership and modular promotion contribute much to the success of this municipal e-government project in China. Implications of this study can be derived for the municipal government development in China and other developing countries