Cross-border knowledge transfer and innovation in the European neighbourhood: Tourism cooperation at the Finnish-Russian border

Knowledge transfer and innovation cooperation between the EU and its neighbours has remained weakly developed. To promote this cooperation, the EU has set up initiatives for the European neighbourhood. The issue has, however, received very limited scholarly attention in the field of tourism. This research gap is addressed here via interview data collected from participants in tourism related EU-funded projects in the Finnish-Russian cross-border region. These underline the importance of EU-funding in facilitating knowledge transfer and innovation between Finland and Russia. While language issues, and differences in business culture and administrative/legislative systems between the two countries, constitute barriers for practical cross-border cooperation, it is cross-border differences in culture and technological capabilities that drive cross-border knowledge transfer and innovation in the cross-border region. The paper concludes with policy recommendations for promoting future cross-border cooperation in innovation and tourism

Impacts of WeChat on Millennials’ Perceptions and Consumption Behaviors in the Hotel Industry

Social media, known as interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications, has deeply changed and reformed interpersonal communication and business operation with the wide spread of Internet and the development of technology. In the past few years, since mobile apps are becoming more and more popular, the access of social media is not limited to tablet computers only, but is also available for almost all kinds of smart phone devices, such as iPhone, Android, Symbian and so on. The function of social media is not confined to real- time message transmission or information sharing any more. It has expanded to a widely range of features, such as online purchase and payment, e-commerce business, and service for different types of social events. Social media plays an increasingly important role in daily personal life as well as in business activities. People are not merely considered as social media users, but also the component of social media itself. As a result, it is very crucial for people to realize the importance and impacts of social media, especially for those business operators. WeChat (Weixin in Chinses, literally “micro message”) is a cross-platform instant text and voice messaging communication service for multiple mobile devices, developed by Tecent in China, first released in the January of 2011. It is claimed to provide “the new way to connect” and create “a way of life”. It is free to download, install and register, and support all kinds of smart phone platforms with multiple language versions, such as Chinese, English, Japanese, French, and Spanish. WeChat provides its users different ways to communicate and interact with friends innovatively through instant text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, group messaging, lively video sharing, location sharing, money transferring, and contact information sharing. Among all the WeChat users, Millennials is the majority. With the growing-up of Millennials, they are becoming more and more powerful and important to the society and will be the next target segmentation for most of the industries in the very near future. Especially for the hotel industry, the industry that urges to attract Millennials patrons for further substantial development, how to attract Millennials is becoming a critical issue for those hotel operators

Content marketing model for leading web content management

This paper is envisaged to provide the Ukrainian businesses with suggestions for a content marketing model for the effective management of website content in order to ensure its leading position on the European and world markets. Our study employed qualitative data collection with semi-structured interviews, survey, observation methods, quantitative and qualitative methods of content analysis of regional B2B companies, as well as the comparative analysis. The following essential stages of the content marketing process as preliminary search and analysis, website content creation, promotion and distribution, and content marketing progress assessment were identified and classified in detail. The strategic decisions and activities at each stage of the process showed how a company’s on-site and off-site content can be used as a tool to establish the relationship between the brand and its target audience and increase brand visibility online. This study offered several useful insights into how website content, social media and various optimization techniques work together in engaging with the target audience and driving website traffic and sales leads. We constructed and described the content marketing model elaborated for effective web content management that can be useful for those companies that start to consider employing content marketing strategy for achieving business goals and increasing a leadership position

A BLOCKCHAIN-BASED ONLINE REVIEW SYSTEM OF TOURISM PRODUCTS USING ETHEREUM

Rapid technological advances have made blockchain technology applicable not only to digital money, but in various fields. One of the areas that can be implemented by blockchain is digital tourism, specifically in the online review system of tourism products. The current online review system has several problems due to its centralized nature. The problem faced is the manipulation of review data which can be in the form of review deletion by a centralized party. This research proposes a decentralized online review system using the Ethereum blockchain technology, Smart Contracts, and IPFS to provide a secure, transparent, and trustworthy online review system platform. The purpose of this research is to implement a permission-less blockchain as a storage for reviews (review forms and log notes) and develop a web application as a user interface. The data used is data from travel sites which contain details about hotels and restaurants in Bukhara. The results displayed are the development of a web application that implements a permission-less blockchain using Ethereum and the system performance is displayed based on system testing, which comprised of unit testing and Black-Box testing

Android Mobile Application „One Click Tourism Advisor‟

Given paper discuss main objectives of “one click tourism advisor” Android mobile Application, which aims to assist tourist with their traveling by allowing user or traveler to enter their preferences (i.e. the content and the country they would like to visit, the preferred visit area they would like to be in that specific country , the budget they would like to spend ,the package they would like to pick and the type of transportation they would like to use ) the application is equipped with functions that take this information from the user and suggest them places accordingly . Furthermore this paper will discuss how it is going to be achieved .To support in depth preliminary studies and number of critical analysis have been performed

AirTransit Trip Planner Application

The number of flight on transit passenger in Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) had been recorded almost 35 million of people in 2010. This passenger on transit will spend their time at the airport while waiting for the next flight without any planning to visit tourism places nearby due to short period of time and much information needed to plan a short trip. This is such a waste because they actually can boost countries’ economy in the tourism sector if they spend their time to visit some tourism places nearby the airport. Because of that, AirTransit Trip Planner aims to help these passenger on transit by planning a short trip to the nearby tourism places within the transition hour they have. AirTransit Trip Planner is using a mathematical algorithm in order to calculate and suggest how many nearby tourism places a user can visit based on their flight transition time. The algorithm also need to consider the distance of the tourism places from user’s current location and also time taken to go there. Besides the mathematical algorithm used for sorting, AirTransit Trip Planner also using Google Map API as a map to guide user and Google Places API as a data center to grab all the tourism places and its details. The output of this calculation is a suggestion of short trip planner for the user (passenger on transit). The trip planner will list down the tourism places user can visit within their flight transition hour, the distance to go there and also time taken to go there. Indirectly, this AirTransit Trip Planner application also helps to boost economy in the tourism sector of a countr

Overview of the personalized and collaborative information retrieval (PIR) track at FIRE-2011

The Personalized and collaborative Information Retrieval (PIR) track at FIRE 2011 was organized with an aim to extend standard information retrieval (IR) ad-hoc test collection design to facilitate research on personalized and collaborative IR by collecting additional meta-information during the topic (query) development process. A controlled query generation process through task-based activities with activity logging was used for each topic developer to construct the final list of topics. The standard ad-hoc collection is thus accompanied by a new set of thematically related topics and the associated log information. We believe this can better simulate a real-world search scenario and encourage mining user information from the logs to improve IR effectiveness. A set of 25 TREC formatted topics and the associated metadata of activity logs were released for the participants to use. In this paper we illustrate the data construction phase in detail and also outline two simple ways of using the additional information from the logs to improve retrieval effectiveness

Entrepreneurship, innovation and inequality : exploring territorial dynamics and development

The ongoing advances in technology have brought significant improvements in the processing speed and storage of large volumes of data. Tech-savvy organisations have already started using big data with a goal to improve their decision making, agility and customer-centric approaches. Today, many tourism marketers are hyper-targeting consumers with real-time mobile ad campaigns to drive conversions. They use analytics to identify how exogenous variables, including the broader economy, competitive offerings and even the weather can affect their organisational performance. Similarly, the smaller enterprises are economically gathering and storing data from each and every customer transaction. They use analytics to customise their offerings and improve their customer engagement. Therefore, this chapter builds on the previous theoretical underpinnings on smart tourism. It clarifies how smart, disruptive technologies have led to endless opportunities for tourism and hospitality marketers to gain a competitive advantage. It explains how they are leveraging themselves by utilising contemporary marketing strategies and tactics that are customer-focused. The researcher examines the use of big data, analytics, programmatic advertising and blockchain technologies in the realms of tourism and hospitality.peer-reviewe