Chapter Preparing tourism businesses for the digital future Abstract

Developing value ecosystems
The development of tourism business ecosystems involves taking a strategic approach to building networks and relationships though which products and services, and customer relationship management takes place over the customer journey including searching, booking, preparation, travel, arrival, destination while in the destination, and post-trip engagement. The shift has been from traditional product-facing, profit-oriented approaches of doing business towards user-facing digital models that produce and deliver shared value. In this shift, value is being generated and shared by consumers, communities, residents, hosts, businesses and governments all working together.
The challenge of developing these ecosystems varies across subsectors and depends on business location and access to technology. Policy conditions that enable increased participation of these businesses into tourism value ecosystems can have important flow on and induced impacts into the broader community and can help tourism transition to diverse, inclusive and green economies.
Box 2.7. Jurni digital tourism visitor information system in South Africa
The National Tourism Visitor Information System has been rebranded and transformed into Jurni, which is an online platform connecting travellers and travel experiences across the country. Jurni acts as a booking tool and business application to help tourism SMEs overcome knowledge and resource constraints to each global markets. It also acts as a central data hub providing insights to inform business strategies and decision-making across the tourism value chain. A consumer-facing app also provides location-tailored information for tourist during their trip, based on geo-localised information, data analytics and artificial intelligence. Jurni is an industry-led alliance between the public and private sector with the aim of transforming the tourism sector in South Africa. With the ultimate goal of collecting and showcasing meaningful travel and tourism data, Jurni aims to support sound, strategic decision-making by providing an unbiased centralised digital data platform and integrated digital solutions. Measures to achieve this include:

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  Establishing consolidated, and comprehensive data hub that will deliver credible data that can subsequently be distilled to a local and regional level.
  
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  A booking tool that is aimed at levelling the playing field for the entire tourism sector.
  
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  An informative visitor portal that allows travellers to discover South Africa’s tourism products and services.
  

The National Tourism Sector Strategy 2016-26 identified the need to provide critical tourism information for decision makers and to develop a clear picture of the size, nature, and characteristics of tourism sector. Eventually, the Jurni app and website aims to provide greater integration between the Jurni platform, data hub and booking tool, and aggregation and exposure of South Africa’s travel and tourism products, services, and experiences, as well as serve as the country’s travel and tourism directory.
Source: https://jurni.co.za/
In Finland, a Roadmap for Digitalisation of Finnish Tourism aims to build a nationwide digital tourism ecosystem, to support sustainable tourism growth and to make Finland become a smart and pioneering destination that provides smoothest customer journey. The digital Roadmap is built around 4 pillars to accelerate the digitalisation of the Finnish tourism sector: Data driven collaboration and management, utilising platform economy and developing multi-channel online distribution, promoting responsibility through digital means and scaling up from smaller regional digital pilots to national way of running the tourism business. In South Africa, the Government has taken a leadership role in developing a public-private partnership to accelerate the development of the digital tourism value ecosystem, as well as promoting open data sharing (Box 2.7).