Spreading visitors more effectively with smart information channels
As recognised in e.g. NBTC’s Perspective 2030 and the Rli report Desirable Tourism there is insufficient (structural) insight into knowledge and data about the visitor economy. There is a need for complete and reliable data to provide guidance and direction to decision-making, development and policy. The theme ‘Smartness’ (part of CELTH’s Agenda Conscious Destinations) aims to bridge this gap and focuses on data management practices through ICT-based solutions used by destinations to facilitate access to tourism and hospitality services, spaces and experiences. Also, with the help of more traditional tools, it targets to improve strategic intelligence for a better understanding of markets, visitors and inhabitants.
Recently, CELTH has started a new project that will be executed from September 2024 until June 2025. This project, ‘Spreading Tourists Effectively’, aims to support Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) to look for effective interventions that discourage tourists from visiting crowded hotspots and attract them to less-visited locations.
Many proposed interventions, such as changing infrastructure, are very expensive. Others, such as charging entry fees or requiring reservations for entry to public spaces, are politically controversial. A much more straightforward intervention is to simply inform tourists differently, but there is doubt if such interventions are effective.
Not much is known yet about how tourists use information at the destination to make moment-to-moment decisions about where to go. In an earlier CELTH project (Experience Overijssel; see here for the final report) an information intervention experiment was used to determine if this would effectively spread tourists, and if it worked across different information channels. It was found that the intervention spread tourists away from hotspots, toward less visited attractions and was effective across information channels. However, this research was conducted over a large area, visited mostly for nature-based tourism and brief visits to small cities. It is not known if the same effects would occur in large national capital cities experiencing overtourism. The new study will address this knowledge gap.
In this study, the effects will be investigated in the context of the cities of Amsterdam and Copenhagen, in cooperation with their DMO’s and the Dutch company Travel With Zoey. The effects of an interactive hybrid chat channel of this company will be compared to one or two other information channels, which will differ per destination.
The goal is to answer the following questions:
- To what extent does receiving information about either popular attractions or less-visited attractions, presented as highlights of the city, influence the movement of tourists to popular or less-visited attractions, and how does this differ by information channel through which the information is presented?
- To what extent does receiving information about either popular attractions or less-visited attractions, presented as highlights of the city, influence tourists’ experience, including their evaluations of the destination?
Apart from the insights in redirecting tourists from locations and times of peak visitation that this project will deliver, this project aims to make a strong contribution to the Smartness of city destinations, by comparing the effects of different information intervention technologies (of which the most promising is a hybrid AI / human empathetic recommender system). This system represents Smartness in the tourist experience at its best, as it delivers smartness with a human touch.
In conclusion, this new project promises to provide crucial knowledge to better understand AI powered recommender systems’ effects and its limitations. That is, if destinations aim to inform and steer tourists in a smarter way, with technology as facilitator rather than as an end in itself.
As indicated, the outcomes of this new project are planned to be available in the summer of 2025. For more information about this project, please contact Ondrej Mitas, researcher at CELTH and Breda University of Applied Sciences.