Katarina Ceglar, Tourism 4.0 expert, was a guest lecturer at University of Maribor, Faculty of tourism in Brežice where she presented her lecture to 3rd year students of the programme Tourism in the frame of the subject Modern trends in tourism.
The main topic of the lecture was the presentation of the Tourism 4.0 paradigm with emphasis on innovations and current trends. Products such as collaboration platform CORE, analysis of tourist flows, Tourism Impact Model (TIM) and digital innovation of cultural heritage were presented. Interesting international projects such as Dates, BeyondSnow gave students an insight into the world of data and the creation of data spaces in order to ensure their transparent control, use and re-use. Since digitalization and innovation are of great interest also to tourism stakeholders, the Digital Readiness Index (DRI) was showcased. This free to use tool was launched by the European project Tourbit to promote digitalization among tourism small and medium enterprises in a simple and effective way. It assesses the digital maturity of companies in the tourism sector in different areas and provides recommendations to promote its implementation.
The students and their mentor Nadja Mlakar enjoyed the demonstration of digitalization in cultural heritage and other innovative methods. They were especially fascinated by the presented concept of data gathering and models who process data in the back-end. They were very interested in the methods, the purpose of data gathering and possible use cases. A sparking debate developed at the end of the presentation on data security, business models and use cases for the application of data on the local level. A focus was given by the lecturer to the need of data gathering and the understanding of the use of local data within the tourism ecosystem as a whole.
Educating future experts and sharing knowledge with them is an important responsibility. Through lectures, students are inspired and motivated to pursue their passions and make meaningful contributions to the field of their future operations. In her lecture, Katarina Ceglar provided students with tools and resources they need to succeed and ultimately shape the future of tourism industry.
