With the participation of O-CITY, from 22 to 24 March 2023 Lloret de Mar hosted the first edition of the Tourism Forum for Coastal Destinations (Foro Turístico de Destinos de Costa), under the slogan “Competitiveness of Sun and Beach”.
The configuration of a smart destination requires the interaction of citizens, tourists, companies and managers, as well as quality data, well maintained and guarded, so that tourism innovation companies can offer quality services at the destination.
During the 1st Tourism Forum for Coastal Destinations in Lloret de Mar, José Marín-Roig, leader of the O-CITY platform, presented the scientific paper “Interactive data for the intelligent management of an ITD“. The meeting was organised by the Climent Guitart Foundation, the University of Girona and Lloret de Mar Town Council through its Climent Guitart Chair in “orientation, innovation and competitiveness in coastal tourism”.
Armando Ortuño, director of the Pedro Zaragozá Chair at the University of Alicante, Antonio Pérez, Mayor of Benidorm, and José Marín-Roig, leader of the O-CITY platform (from left to right).
The Forum was attended by political representatives and university chairs from the municipalities of the Alliance of Sun and Beach Tourism Municipalities (AMT), other chairs from the Mediterranean coast and the Canary Islands and senior researchers specialising in tourism from eight Spanish universities.
Marín-Roig, who participated on behalf of the Chair Gandia Smart Tourism, showed the contribution of the interactive database of the natural and cultural heritage of the international destination O-CITY, to the indicators of Smart Tourism Destinations (ITD) from the double perspective of database and interactive application, through use cases.
Thanks to the contribution of the co-authors of the paper Marta Ciudad, Antonio Roldán-Ponce and Valentina Volpi, significant progress has been made in the evolution of this interactive platform towards its usefulness in relation to the indicators and becoming a key tool for the basic configuration of an ITD.
During the Forum, José Marín-Roig took the opportunity to present the new Master’s Degree in Tourism Intelligence of the Polytechnic University of Valencia -Gandia campus-, which will be part of the training offer 2023-2024.
More information about the Master’s Degree in Tourism Intelligence:
http://www.upv.es/contenidos/CGANDIA/administracion/1121720normalc.html
The programme of the Coastal Destination Tourism Forum in Lloret de Mar covered various tourism-related topics such as the contribution of coastal tourism municipalities to society, as well as tables of papers by leading university researchers who shared their scientific knowledge on tourism innovation and competitiveness in coastal destinations.
There were also paper sessions on the legal system, public management and municipal financing.
O-CITY and working methodology
This paper evaluates the O-City.org tool, built and maintained in the public (EU) domain, as a solution for the storage of natural and cultural heritage data of destinations. O-CITY is not only a database, developed following the canons of data management (DAMA, 2017) and the quality and interoperability standards in force, but it is also an interactive application that offers value-added services, such as marketing tools to strengthen the promotion of the attractions of the destination with international reach, and citizen participation actions as a boost to the social sustainability of tourism.
INNOVATION FOR TERRITORIAL DEVELOPMENT
O-CITY is a technological platform for education, collaboration and international tourism promotion, the digital tool developed and led by the UPV Campus in Gandia in the context of a European project, which evolves day by day by and for people:
www.o-city.org
O-CITY cultural and natural heritage platform enables the digitisation of tourist information about any place, offering multimedia information and virtual tours. A platform open to citizen participation in which anyone can generate content about any place in the world.
O-CITY is currently working with the Government of Ukraine to place a representation of the country’s cultural and natural heritage on the digital atlas.