The Altour project led by Gerard Garcia Anglès, Eric Moreno Edo, Gina Stolwijk and Miquel Orozco Gavaldà has scooped first prize in the Barcelona final of the Miro In Cube tourism innovation competition. Their winning entry is a tourism gamification app in which businesses can showcase their events for active and sustainable tourism and thus raise the profile of SMEs.
Altour’s solution provides recommendations for tourism activities customised to the interests of users by tapping artificial intelligence.
Slowcal picked up second prize in the Barcelona final with an app and website designed to connect residents and tourists with sustainable businesses in Barcelona. The project is led by Manal Errabih, Mikaela Mateos, Trang Nguyễn, Thanh Le and Despoina Vlachou, a group of CETT-UB students.
Third prize went to Starbound headed by Hadi Hissi. It features a pressurised capsule powered by a stratospheric balloon in which four passengers would travel into space on a journey starting and ending a few miles off the coast of Barcelona.
Miro In Cube has been held for the fourth time and this time round has sought projects to address the tourism sector’s resilience or ability to bounce back from 2021, a year marred by the Covid-19 health crisis.
International final
The Miro In Cube hackathon grand final was held at 4YFN as part of the Mobile World Congress programme where an international jury handed out the Euroregional Tourism Innovation Award and the Amadeus prize for the best tech solution.
Kultours walked off with the Euroregional Tourism Innovation Award while the Slowcal project picked up the Amadeus for Developers Award for the best tech solution.
Resilience: the future of tourism in the Euroregion in 2021
Amidst technological developments, innovations and a difficult healthcare situation, the Miro In Cube competition this year addressed new challenges to invent the tourism of the future and unpacked the issues involved in getting the tourism industry back on track.
Each city submitted a choice of three challenges to its contestants which were tailored to each region and its special features and included the idea of resilience. In Barcelona’s case, contestants built their projects by tackling issues in tourism’s economic, environmental and socio-cultural sustainability in order to devise innovative sustainable projects which cater for real and specific problems.
A Euroregional competition
Miro In Cube was a simultaneous hackathon lasting 56 hours from Friday 25 to Sunday 27 June. Contestants set up teams, completed an initial selection stage, benefited from mentoring sessions and attended workshops led by tourism, entrepreneurship, technology and research experts.
As in the previous two years, this year’s event was held simultaneously in three cities: in Perpignan at the UPVD IN CUBE incubator, in Barcelona at the Hotel Alimara, and in Palma at Parc Bit.
The three hackathon venues shared live streaming and simultaneous translation. The choice of this format stems from the innovative training approach put in place at the University of Perpignan under the IDEFI Miro Programme with a view to fostering collaboration, open-mindedness and knowledge sharing as essential qualities in innovation and entrepreneurship.
#MIC21 adventure partners and planners
The Catalan Government is a joint organiser of Miro in Cube in Catalonia via its ministries of Business and Employment and the Vice-Presidency and Digital Policies and Territory. CETT is a strategic partner of the initiative. and Mobile World Capital Barcelona is a partner. It is supported by Hotel Alimara Barcelona and the Eurecat technology centre.
The Miro In Cube hackathon is also backed by 22@network, Amics UAB, the College of Computer Engineering of Catalonia (COEINF), Datahack, DataScience UB, Foment del Treball, IED, La Salle-URL, Ostelea, the University of Girona Science and Technology Park (Parc UdG), Techbloom, UDL, UIC and UPF Ventures.
The Balearic Foundation for Innovation and Technology is joint organiser of Miro In Cube on the Balearic Islands via the Department of European Funds, University and Culture and the Department of Energy Transition, Productive Sectors and Democratic Memory in the Balearic Islands Government’s Directorate General of Innovation.
The technology partner is Amadeus, the world’s leading provider of technology and distribution solutions for the travel industry, which has been involved through its Amadeus for Developers programme for start-ups. This partnership provided contestants with free access to APIs (application programming interfaces), onsite technical support in Perpignan and remote support for contestants at the other venues.
