Abstract
Creating smart tourism destinations requires innovative solutions which cover the main pillars of sustainability as sociocultural, environmental, and economic aspects, in order to spread the cultural heritage of these tourist destinations to their visitors. One of the most demanded approaches by the new hyper-connected visitors is the expectation of plunging and becoming a short-term resident to receive a real experience during their visit. Therefore, the scope of this research covers the objective of designing an innovative communication channel between a visitor and a point of interest (POI), which in turn allows agile experiences to be built and provided and increases the dissemination of cultural heritage through new technologies, considering the real needs of the territories and the new digital visitors. In order to address these topics, this paper proposes an innovative and co-created progressive Web-App for visitors called Be Memories in order to spread the intangible heritage of a tourist destination, where the content is co-created by residents of the destination. The tool has been tested in Ceutí, a Spanish village with a high cultural value, which needs to be disseminated through new innovative tools. The trial was launched during local festivities of the village using an Internet of Things device, called a Smart Spot, to establish a communication channel between the visitor and POI. The results of the test were measured using Google Analytics, the reactions of Be Memories in social networks, and the acceptance of other cities and European committees. The results have concluded that Be Memories is able to enable a local experience via agile, fresh, and crowd-sourced content that people enjoy. This channel presents a complementary level of information with respect to official sources, documentaries, and local guide tours, at the same time enabling a mechanism to promote physical visits, walking tours, and cultural heritage via low-cost and sustainable infrastructure.
Highlights
The sustainability of tourism destinations is one of the main current pillars of the territories building smart tourism destinations and smart cities
This device determines the artefact to be tested in the application scope in order to know the issues that could arise during the actual deployment to discover these aspects during the product/service definition process [60]. This draft is based on previous research called Smart Tourism Destination & Cultural Heritage: A New Unexplored Sector in Smart Cities Development [9], which analysed the tourism domain and Internet of Thing (IoT) technologies
This paper establishes the use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices called Smart Spots (Figure 2) [8], which allow the cultural point of interest (POI) to be transformed into a smart point of interaction denominated as Smart POI [9]
Summary
The sustainability of tourism destinations is one of the main current pillars of the territories building smart tourism destinations and smart cities. Sustainable tourism is based on three main aspects when building a smart environment: the environment, socio-culture, and economy [1] Organizations such as United Nations World Tourism (UNWTO) [2] have highlighted the relevance of the sustainability of tourism destinations to be considered smart when using its resources with powerful strategies. This aspect is affecting the tourism domain as it is related to the growing concept of the smart city, which was born to apply sustainability in city management. It is here where the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) stands out because they are able to improve these strategies and changes by taking advantage of the benefits that these technologies provide, such as Big Data collection, the automation of processes, sensors, wearables, etc
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