Chapter Preparing tourism businesses for the digital future Abstract

Enhancing SME management through data
Data has important consequences for tourism SMEs in terms of how they build awareness, market their products and services, engage with customers, and facilitate purchases across multiple devices and platforms. Research shows that only 11% of small firms perform big data analysis, compared to 33% of large firms, and similarly on average, 56% of large businesses purchased cloud-computing services compared to 27% of small businesses (OECD, 2019b). Privacy and data protection issues can also arise with the collection and use of data by businesses themselves, including in relation to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe.
Data is a key resource in the digital economy, and the ability of tourism businesses to use data to inform business planning, operations and service deliver is gaining importance. Data is particularly useful for business (accommodation) to enhance revenue management practices and employ dynamic pricing, common in larger firms. One issue for smaller tourism businesses is gaining access to this data, as the larger digital platforms can act as gatekeepers to large amounts of data collected about individual businesses, their customers and market transaction. This is an issue on the policy agenda of many countries, with some exploring ways to collect and share data openly with tourism stakeholders, including:

• 
  In Croatia, the eVisitor system acts as a central platform for tourism data management (Box 1.15).
  
• 
  In Portugal, a new business intelligence tool, TravelBI, is a data hub for the tourism sector, bringing together traditional data, new data sources, geodata and opendata services, as well as data analytics tools to transform the data into an easily digestible format for tourism businesses.
  
• 
  In Denmark, the TourismTech Datalake initiative aims to support the development of new tourism business models by collecting and making data available to tourism stakeholders. This initiative is in its early stages, but further pilot projects have been proposed to test data analytics with various IoT solutions.
  
• 
  In Poland, "Open Data Plus" aims to increase the quantity and improve the quality of open public data, and popularise their use. The project implementation in tourism sector includes: adaptation of registers to applicable law and amending of publicly available online central registers of the hotel and accommodation base, mountain guides, training organisers for Mountain Guides.