Smart Tourism in Ireland
Smart Cities improve urban life for their citizens through technology and innovation. A little over a year ago, Dublin asked themselves how they can extend that concept to improve life for urban visitors. Dublin’s long-term commitment to Smart Tourism is the first of its kind for major cities in Europe. We talked to Dublin’s Smart Tourism Programme Manager, Barry Rogers, to find out more.
What is Smart Tourism?
Barry answered this question as a means of addressing the gap between tourism and technology, and keeping Dublin’s tourism sector up to date with the rapidly changing world of digital product development. The Smart Dublin website describes it as:
A model for supporting innovation and driving positive transformation within destinations. It uses technology, data analysis and digitalisation to build more accessible, sustainable and equitable destinations, ultimately creating more inclusive prosperity for locals and better experiences for visitors.
Ok, but what does that mean? How does it work?
The Smart Tourism Programme at Dublin came together through a collaboration between Smart Dublin and Failte Ireland. Because it had a two-year timeline, they could afford to spend their first year finding out exactly what works. In the first year of the programme, Barry and his team identified where the demand was for data and digital support in the tourism sector, and also where knowledge and work gaps exist. Now they can focus their efforts on meeting those demands and addressing those gaps.
One way they do this is with app development projects, with a focus on “digital trails” or digitally guided tours. But important is to not digitise anything for the sake of shoehorning technology, but rather to enhance the tour or destination when appropriate to create an unforgettable experience for tourists. The Heritage Trail App with augmented reality is the team’s crown achievement in this regard, internationally recognized as demonstrating absolute best practices in the space. The team has developed a Digital Trails Toolkit as well to ensure more such experiences can be enhanced with digital technology. Barry emphasized the importance of creating apps that are not siloed from the traditional tourism experience but are rather welcome additions that can show and teach visitors things that would otherwise not be possible.
What impacts have you seen?
One very visible impact can be seen with Ireland’s smart kiosks. Dublin has smart kiosks across the city, replacing phone boxes. Dublin’s Smart Tourism work programme designed a user interface for them that optimizes the experience for tourists by pulling from Dublin’s rich open data portals, including Dublinked and Culture Near You.
The kiosks show things like what cultural attractions are taking place in a walking radius and will also give you a QR code for directions on your smartphone navigation app. There is no need there to compete with Google’s products, for example, but they can make their information available to tourists in a way that is easily compatible with the tourism smartphone applications that already exist. The API for the smart kiosk interface is nationwide in Ireland.
How else do you use data for Smart Tourism?
Another major way is through recovery monitoring. The Smart Tourism Programme produces a Spotlight Report each month using key economic indicators such as Spend, Footfall, Mobility, Accommodation and Air & Sea Access to evaluate the tourism recovery and influence decision-making. The report not only gives the raw data to interested parties but analyses and interprets it. For example, a huge spike in hotel bookings one evening could be explained by a Garth Brooks concert and increases in mobility can be presented by St. Patrick’s Festival. Dips in the indicators often correlate with major weather warnings or COVID incidence spikes. The data report goes out to a wide variety of stakeholders and is used for things like appraising events such as St. Patrick’s Festival, evaluating the success of new products or services in Dublin, and tracking COVID recovery.
What is your main goal with your work?
The goal of the Smart Tourism programme is to establish Dublin as a “world-leading ‘Smart Destination’ through innovative projects, research and partnerships.” For Barry personally, he wants to fly the flag for how important it is for the tourism industry to grapple with digital experience development and economic analysis.
Want to read more about Smart City implementations? Find them on the BABLE platform!
Make sure to also take a look at our other tourism-related Medium articles, and always feel free to reach out to us for any inquiry.
