Digital Gifts and Tourism Mementos: A Sustainable Approach

Abstract

Touristic destinations all around the world are struggling to digitally transform the touristic experience and the touristic products they offer and to capitalize a good experience with new tourists and returning ones. There is a lot of research on digital solutions assisting tourism, but it does not provide a follow-up digital product, therefore depending only on physical gifts, postcards and mementos. In this work, we propose a novel platform that can provide a personalized digital memento or digital gift for every route or tourist destination that can become the digital point of reference of visitors’ experience giving new dimensions for commercialization to the existing physical mementos at the gift shops. The purpose of this study is to analyze what comprises a memorable touristic experience and to design and, finally, present a total solution that builds and offers a personal e-souvenir of a touristic experience to the tourist for him to hold, sport and share just using his mobile phone. We propose a digital memento-building platform that includes the personalized experience in visits taking place while in vacations. The visitors are usually taking pictures along routes they follow that later need further organization and processing and that in no way substitutes the physical mementos. In our approach, we propose a solution that generates a unique and personalized e-souvenir through a collage of the selfies and photos creating the digital equivalent of the touristic postcards but in our case personalized with the visitor photos with minimum amount of effort and produced real-time. Our approach is also providing a platform to the photographers and designers of touristic destinations to build and graphically generated memento artifacts—templates specific for one or more destinations or routes. In this way, the approach serves the tourism industry vertically, covering all aspects, i.e., the tourist-visitor, the tourism professional players such as photographers, designers of physical mementos and, of course, the touristic destination providing a digital footprint to server marketing of the destination through sharing on social media and word-of-mouth, of course. To support our approach, we have built and run a fully working prototype in the touristic center of Athens, Greece, with real users and designers for several weeks during summer vacations. The results have been greatly encouraging from end-users and professionals. The study shows that it is possible for various lines of business to come together and work along one another for an improve touristic experience using mobile technologies in a personalized, targeted approach. The touristic destination, graphic designers, photographers, tourist agent specialists, software developers and visitors can all now have a digital personalized memorable gift from the visit.