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Digital transformation and virtual tourism

Published on May 30, 2022   20 min

A selection of talks on Technology & Operations

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0:00
Hello. My name is Professor Dimitrios Buhalis. I'm a Professor at Bournemouth University Business School, and a visiting professor of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I'm also the editor-in-chief of Tourism Review, the most established and the oldest journal in tourism, and the editor-in-chief of the encyclopedia of Tourism Management and Marketing that will be published in August 2022. I'll be talking to you today about digital transformation, smartness, and ambient tourism. Looking at how technology is going to change everything we do in tourism in the future.
0:39
Of course, the last two years have been a very difficult situation due to COVID. You can see from the United Nations Waters Organization that international tourism arrivals in 2020 suffered a drop of 74%. 2021 was a better year for tourism, but still, we're very far away from the activity that we had in 2019 where a lot of us were able to travel freely and enjoy tourism around the world.
1:13
This had an immense impact because a lot of companies, a lot of organisations, have changed. You can see on this slide, the Cairns' Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park, which I was visiting some years ago, had to close as a result of COVID.
1:32
You can see what the predictions are from the United Nations World Tourism Organization. But of course, nobody really knows what's happening. This gives us context on where we are and what is going to happen. From the beginning of the pandemic,

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