The Eurecat technology centre together with several businesses in the tourism value chain is engaged in seven digitalisation and technology development projects in the tourism industry with a total budget coming to over €2.5 million as part of the Last Mile call for proposals from the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism.
In these projects Eurecat is to develop solutions for digitalisation and introducing new emerging technologies for enterprises engaged in tourism operations such as accommodation, travel agencies, guide services, cultural resources, retail and technology. Three of the seven projects involve consortiums of businesses while four are with individual companies.
“The projects Eurecat is to implement include tapping artificial intelligence technologies, big data, digital twins and more to unlock digitalisation in tourism firms,” says Rolando García, head of Tourism Industry Business Development at Eurecat.
“Digitalising tourism and running innovative and unique projects with new emerging technologies is crucial to make progress in transforming the industry to ensure tourism business and undertakings are competitive,” adds Roger Font, director of Eurecat’s Technology Consultancy Department.
The projects will target harnessing technologies to develop an AI-powered voice assistant for tourist accommodation using large language models (LLM), crafting 3D digital twins for accommodation and retail establishments to optimise energy and water use, training assistants with artificial intelligence to suggest tourist itineraries, and generating a dynamic pricing model for cultural resources.
They will also drive rolling out a digital transformation roadmap for a tourism route app featuring augmented reality, defining a quality assessment platform for tourism destinations and implementing sustainability indicators for these destinations.
The Last Mile grant programme is part of the Digitalisation and Intelligence Programme for tourism destinations and the industry and undertakes actions to foster the digitalisation of tourism businesses, mainly small and medium-sized enterprises, and associations or associative entities in order to undertake innovative technology-based projects.
This Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism grant programme comes under the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR) financed by the European Union’s Next Generation funds and seeks to unlock the digitalisation of tourism companies and destinations to make them more competitive.
