Market Introduction
Smart tourism is an amalgamation of tourism and technology, the application of advanced technologies to develop tools to enhance customer’s experience and manage day-to-day task effectively in tourism industry. Smart tourism is still at development stage that is influenced by evolution of advanced technologies. Considering tourism, smart technologies are changing the way consumer experiences tourism before. It is on way to create innovative tourism business models. Big data, cloud computing, geo-tag services, mobile apps, beacon technology, location-based services, augmented reality, social networking services, and virtual reality falls under wide area of examples for smart technologies that helps in enhancing the tourism services and experiences. While mentioning about business side, smart tourism allows to manage tourist flows in new ways, better services for tourists, innovative advertising models and collaborative ventures that are done on open data and cloud services to overcome industrial traditional boundaries. However, lower adoption from cities is the challenge faced by smart tourism industry.
Drivers and restrain factor of the market
Data-driven innovation is the new trend almost every industry is facing. It is one of the key pillars of economic growth for countries. To increase productivity, competitiveness, wellbeing and resource efficiency, data driven decisions and actions are adopted. Continuous shift in social and economic activities from manual form to internet coupled with less data collection costs concludes that data analytics is increasingly boosting innovation. It is a vital source of growth platforms that ensure travelers with better informed plans and offers during their travel planning process. These digital platforms which are used for interactions create huge amount of data that can be successfully used by businesses to better understand the market dynamics and about their competitors.
Major players in the market
Travelgenio, Booking Holdings, QUNR, Expedia, HomeAway, Kayak, Ctrip, Opodo, Orbitz, Sabre Corporation, MakeMyTrip, TravelZoo, TripAdvisor and others are some major players present in the market. Companies are looking forward to setting up in the market by adopting various strategies that include expansion, product launch, mergers and acquisitions, advancements and others.
Recent key development in the market
Acquisition: A step of company to combine best in air travel
MakeMyTrip acquired Mumbai based firm Quest2Travel for an undisclosed amount. This acquisition will help MakeMyTrip by extending their services for large corporates for travel purposes while gaining benefits from Quest2Travel expertise in the same domain of working.
Leading region and fastest growing region
Geographically, the market is segmented in regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and RoW. In which, North America dominate the market due to wide acceptance of technological advancements in the region. Whereas, Asia Pacific shows a promising growth and seems to be a fastest growing region in regard to growth of smart tourism market over the forecast period. This region is expected to witness rising IT infrastructure and more rapid development in smart cities infrastructure.
Market segment
The analysis is based upon segmenting the market into two different segments such as product type and application type. The product type segment is further sub-segmented into online and offline. Whereas, the application type segment is further sub-segmented into market reservations, translations services, direction guidance, audio guidance and others.
