Digital Tourist in a Digital World - New Ways of Making Tourism in the XXIth Century

Abstract

The pandemic period has influenced (positively or negatively) many areas of activity. The main reason why this has happened is that tourism, unlike other areas, has activities focused on the consumer of tourist services, which means an extremely large number of citizens and not on the development of a good or service that meets the need. The classic tourist does not necessarily want access to the tourist infrastructure (restaurants / hotels) as much as he wants access to points of interest, tourist infrastructure being a bonus. Unfortunately, the authorities have not found a "winning formula" to attract tourists and give them what they need and want - access to tourist information and points of interest. Moreover, there is a strong lack of information on the number of tourists who came to a certain area, who visited a certain destination, and the feedback they provided. Until recently, all was monitored by the National Tourist Information Centers, which were forced by the Ministry of Tourism to present very high figures in order to look “good”. This research is intended to present the output of a project that the authors implemented four years ago at the national level, in the field of tourism, to demonstrate the need and usefulness of transforming classic tourism into a digital one. The project consists of marking and promoting the tourist and cultural capital, through Quick Response (QR) code plates, which are mounted in the area of points of interest and which, once scanned by tourists, provide them with information about the history and legends of the point of interest. It also provides developers with information about tourists, such as the number of people who scanned a particular QR code, the genre of people who scanned, the type of device, the period in which they scanned, and the operating system of their scanning device. More than the presentation of the output, this research also includes the result of a study applied to a sample of 350 respondents, users of the project, through which we wanted to see if there is a direct link between customer satisfaction (CSAT) and access to historical, tourist, and cultural information.