News
Information technology and sustainable tourism
Professor Iscte Technologies and Architecture
Researcher ISTAR-Iscte
This European project involves three research centres (ISTAR-Iscte, BRU-Iscte, IT-Institute of Telecommunications) and aims to produce IT-based "toolboxes" to help tourism SMEs.
What are the goals that this project wants to achieve?
The main objective is the transition to more resilient, circular, and sustainable operating models in tourism by integrating digital solutions to improve the quality of the tourism experience, decarbonize the sector, and contribute to more inclusive economic growth – not only for European tourism SMEs but also for destination residents. More than half of the RESETTING (resetting.eu) budget, which exceeds one million euros, will be allocated to 60 SMEs in the field of tourism, 12 of which are in Portugal.
Iscte's RESETTING team is multidisciplinary, with researchers from computing, telecommunications, tourism, and marketing. This intersection of diversified skills, facilitated by the Iscte ecosystem, has allowed us to set ambitious goals.
How is Iscte involved and committed to this project?
ISTAR-Iscte coordinates Iscte's participation in RESETTING, but researchers from BRU-Iscte and IT also participate. Iscte has the largest budget within the consortium and is responsible for two of the six RESETTING work packages, one called "Smart Tourism Tools" (STT) and the other "Data Analytics for Tourism." The first, which aims to facilitate the creation of tools for the so-called "Smart Tourism," involves the most resources throughout the project, with about 12 researchers and support staff.
What are these tools, and how can they help tourism?
We are developing three toolboxes with open-source software, accessible hardware, detailed instructions, illustrative films, and application examples, enabling European SMEs to build solutions for smart tourism in diverse contexts. One toolbox is related to the detection, visualization, retrospective analysis, and prediction of tourist crowding, a well-known problem in Lisbon that occurs when the carrying capacity of destinations is exceeded. This toolbox helps implement mitigation strategies, such as dosing visitation or suggesting less problematic routes and schedules.
We have developed a detector at Iscte that, based on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies used by mobile phones, estimates the number of people in its vicinity. Prototypes of these detectors have been tested in various locations on our campus, and soon, we will install them at critical points in the park of the emblematic Pena Palace, thanks to a partnership with Parques de Sintra.
Another toolbox aims to use augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) in historical visitation sites to recreate a visitation experience closer to what it would have been originally. The prototype under construction will be validated at Monserrate Palace, also in collaboration with Parques de Sintra.
The objective here will be to recreate, using AR/VR, a visit during the opulent phase of life in this palace, in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, when the English Cook family lived there. The palace building has recently been restored, but its contents have been almost entirely lost to time. The recreation will be achieved by superimposing two-dimensional photographs of the time with three-dimensional images currently captured on-site. Three-dimensional virtual replicas of real objects appearing in the old photographs will also be created.
The team is multidisciplinary, with researchers from computing, telecommunications, tourism, and marketing. This intersection of diverse skills, facilitated by the Iscte ecosystem, has allowed us to set ambitious goals for this project.
What about the third toolbox?
The latest toolbox will combine uncrewed aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones, with 5G mobile communication that enables high-definition video transmission. The objective is to allow visits to inaccessible places, either due to physical limitations of the visitors themselves (promoting more inclusive tourism) or to the inaccessibility of the place itself, or even to promote the environmental sustainability of protected destinations. It is intended that visitors will be able to remotely select and control more than one camera on the drone and interact with its pilot and the other participants in the tour, resulting in a more realistic experience. The validation tests will occur in collaboration with a scientific tourism company in the ocean.
Are the institutions participating in this research consortium very diverse?
There are research and technology transfer institutions such as Iscte and Eurecat (Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya), a tourism association (Federació Empresarial d'Hostaleria I Turisme de la Provincia de Tarragona), an association of technology companies (Clúster TIC Catalunya Sud), a Greek government tourism agency (Heraklion Development Agency), the municipality of San Benedetto del Tronto in Italy, an Albanian tourist agency (Albanian Trip) and also a business incubator, our well-known AUDAX. This diversity has translated into a very stimulating range of opinions, which is crucial to the success of the European Commission's COSME application.
This project aims to transition to a more resilient, circular and sustainable tourism model, a line of research that Iscte has already explored.
The idea was born a few years ago, when another project was collaborating with an environmental NGO, GEOTA, the New University of Lisbon, and the Estoril School of Hospitality and Tourism. It was called SUSTENTURIS, which was focused on the sustainability of tourism and was supported by the Environmental Fund. The idea was the team is multidisciplinary, with researchers from the areas of computing, telecommunications, tourism and marketing. This intersection of diverse skills, facilitated by the Iscte ecosystem, has allowed us to set ambitious goals for this project. Creating a business-to-business (B2B) marketplace will connect SMEs offering sustainable products and experiences (such as hiking, visits to salt pans, handicrafts, bird watching, and many others) with large tourism operators. The inclusion of these sustainable products and experiences in tour packages would allow the reduction of the ecological footprint, particularly for long-haul tourists.
We entered a pandemic, tourism stopped, and the planet took a deep breath in those years, lowering pollution levels globally. In the meantime, several of my students have finished their master's thesis on using technological solutions to promote sustainable tourism. I invited a professor from a university in Catalonia who has relevant work in the area to be an arguer. He appreciated the work we were doing at Iscte so much that after a short time, he invited us to join the consortium that designed the proposal for the European project RESETTING.
European Observatory on Smart Tourism Tools
In recent years, due to the need to rethink more resilient (due to the pandemic) and more sustainable (due to the climate emergency) forms of tourism, many solutions and tools for smart tourism have been proposed: the above-mentioned Smart Tourism Tools (STT). However, they are not easily adopted by European tourism SMEs, not only due to the usual challenges of the digital transition (namely the requirement for appropriate digital skills) but often, as is recognised by the European Commission, simply due to the lack of knowledge that these solutions and tools exist and can bring value to the SME business.
Iscte has a tradition of creating and maintaining observatories in various areas of the Social Sciences. As part of RESETTING, Iscte will develop its first observatory related to information technologies, the European Observatory for Smart Tourism Tools. It will be based on a platform for virtual fairs in the cloud, where European companies developing or using STT will be able to have their stand free of charge, open and permanently, with the sponsorship of the European Commission. At the virtual fair, these STTs will be organised according to a taxonomy we developed at Iscte, which experts with worldwide projections recently validated in the area.