As part of the 31st international Bled eConference, Tourism 4.0 initiative hosted a special panel dedicated to Tourism 4.0 in order to inspire a bottom up transformation of tourism in Slovenia. Representatives of academia, government and private sector as well as public have engaged in a vivid discussion. The participants have slowly begun to recognise that technology does not lay at the core of digitalisation. The key is collaboration, cooperation and co-creation of all stakeholders.
The whole program was moderated by Urška Starc Peceny, Arctur, connecting the initiative to the knowledge of academic from the fields of tourism and technology as well as encouraging the debate centred the needs of stakeholders of tourism ecosystem in Slovenia and globally. In addition to the experience from Slovene tourism some inspiration from abroad stirred imagination of the audience after the speech of Mark Parsons, Director of EPCC and Associate Dean for e-Research, University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and Alejandra Patino and Mauricio Magdaleno from Cluster de Turismo Monterrey in Mexico. But this was just the beginning.
The interdisciplinary energy, visions and ideas filled the conference room during the Round table 4.0 with Peter Wostner from the Government Office for Development and European Cohesion Policy, Tomi Ilijaš from Arctur Ltd., Janez Mekinc from the Faculty of Tourism Studies Turistica, University of Primorska, Tomaž Curk, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, and Saša Kek from Association of Municipalities and Towns of Slovenia. After knowledgeable interventions from the public, we concluded that Tourism 4.0 Partnership should be created to identify and discover innovation potential in the tourism sector and to create enriched tourist experiences with the help of new technologies.
