Oliver Csendes of the Austrian National Tourist Office (ANTO) delved into the insights gained from building a platform-based ecosystem for data-driven applications while navigating the complexities of the tourism industry and overcoming resistance to change.

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The New Era of Tourism

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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tourism industry has undergone a period of unprecedented disruption. Amidst this changing landscape, ANTO has emerged as a beacon of innovation and adaptability, embracing new technologies and business models through systemic and cultural transformation to position Austria as a leading destination for sustainable and digital tourism.

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The tourism industry in Austria, a key economic driver contributing 12% of the country's GDP, grapples with numerous challenges in the evolving landscape. The industry's fragmentation and complex structure combined with the lack of political power to influence regulations at a national level creates significant hurdles to progress. Furthermore, knowledge gaps in technological advancements, data management, open innovation and new business models hinder the industry's ability to adapt and thrive in the digital age, especially given the resistance to change.

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The post-COVID landscape has created a new era of tourism, where DMOs must drive the industry's transformation to better respond to the increased reliance on technology and the new preferences of travellers. Such shifts include the rapid increase in the number of messages in the digital space, creating a landscape where standing out from the crowd has become even more paramount. Simultaneously, well-informed consumers are contributing to the growing demand for sustainable and personalised travel experiences, necessitating a change in approach from pure demographics to targeting specific personas. Therefore, the tourism sector must accept the increasing need for complex models, where data-driven approaches are needed to ensure competitiveness.

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Navigating: Ecosystems and Platforms

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Ecosystem business models are becoming more popular worldwide and are common in the tourism sector. They have emerged as a transformative approach to value creation and enhancing the guest experience. These ecosystems bring together diverse organisations, each contributing their unique expertise and resources, to deliver a seamless and personalised travel journey.

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The essence of ecosystem business models lies in the collaborative efforts of organisations to generate collective value that surpasses what any single entity could achieve alone. Partners leverage a shared platform and contribute complementary modules to create a unified and cohesive governance structure to guide cooperation.

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In the tourism industry, platforms are enabling positive externalities by connecting travellers, destinations and service providers. This is leading to more personalised and seamless travel experiences as well as increased efficiency and innovation across the industry. For example, platforms like Airbnb and Expedia connect travellers with a wide range of accommodation and travel options, while platforms like Google Maps and TripAdvisor provide travellers with real-time information and recommendations.

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These ecosystems are not confined within the traditional boundaries of the tourism industry; instead, they transcend industry silos and foster cross-sector partnerships. Estimates suggest that by 2025, 30% of global revenue will be generated through such cross-industry partnerships.

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Establishing a successful ecosystem for innovation requires a structured approach that encompasses a four-stage journey:

1. ‍Ramp-up: This phase focuses on preparing the innovation ecosystem and encouraging partners to participate in the collaborative efforts.  ‍
2. Development: This phase involves the creation of new applications that solve shared challenges. ‍
3. Enablement: This phase encourages users to adopt the developed applications and utilise the insights within their operations.
4. ‍Quality control and support: This phase ensures that all applications deliver quality insights that support businesses, identifying opportunities for continuous improvement to support businesses with even more granular insights.

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Following this structured approach ensures the ecosystem continuously delivers value to its participants and contributes to the advancement of tourism innovation.

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To successfully innovate, ecosystems need four key elements to ensure the widespread adoption and effective implementation of solutions:

1. ‍Community: A strong and engaged community is essential, where organisations are willing and able to cooperate in the pursuit of mutual benefits.
2. ‍Knowledge: The exchange of knowledge is crucial, where organisations understand the evolving industry trends and share their experiences of pilot projects, highlighting successes and most importantly failures and key learning outcomes
3. ‍Data: Data is the foundation for informed decision-making and effective innovation. It enables organisations to monitor the changing tourism landscape and track their performance with increasing granularity. There are vast quantities of data available for tourism businesses to tap into, with endless possibilities for supporting effective transformation.
4. ‍Application: Ensuring practical solutions are developed using data-driven knowledge and collaboration. Organisations need the capability to turn insights into an effective remedy for the challenges faced.

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ANTO as a platform for innovation ecosystems

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ANTO recognises the transformative potential of ecosystem business models and has established itself as a leading platform within the tourism industry. With over 40,000 tourism SMEs in the country, ANTO is actively seeking ways to support them to improve their digital maturity and sustainability performance.

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ANTO is developing the Change Tourism Austria platform that will bring together the nine federal states of Austria and provide a community for changemakers from the entire sector, including students, startups, DMOs and community managers. The platform has no branding from ANTO to ensure partners understand that participating doesn't have any obligations attached, with support provided free of charge.

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The platform will leverage the power of ecosystem building contributing to the following benefits:

1. Network effects: As more users join the platform, the data structure gets enriched and value increases for all participants, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of growth.
2. Economies of scale: Joint infrastructure investments and standards will lead to cost reductions and improved efficiency, making the platform more attractive to new users.
3. Knowledge transfer: Best practices will be shared across the community, leading to continuous improvement and innovation across the country.
4. Risk mitigation: While innovations by nature sometimes fail, taking a cooperative approach means that successful projects from other regions can be leveraged to minimise risks and accelerate the adoption of new technologies.

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ANTO ran a Tourism Data Challenge hackathon with Microsoft to ideate solutions around maximising the potential of open data service ecosystems to improve the sustainability of tourism. Such an approach is vital for exchanging knowledge and data insights alongside understanding differing perspectives to creatively solve the industry's challenges in a way that brings benefits to the majority of stakeholders.

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The Power of Data and Networks

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Data is at the heart of ANTO's strategy for navigating the new era of tourism. The organisation has used the Gaia X standards to establish a national tourism data space, which provides a decentralised infrastructure for secure and sustainable data sharing. ANTO paid for the hubs for all nine federal states in an ambition to ensure the entire country transforms and eliminate budgetary constraints, providing them with all the resources needed to incorporate data more strategically into their operations. By respecting data ownership by storing data in the source system, the data space provides strong governance and data interfaces to drive data-led decision-making in tourism and help create successful use cases:

1. Visitor Flow Analysis: Using mobile phones, social media, weather and traffic data, ANTO provided a compelling argument for public transport companies to adjust bus schedules, communicate the changes in the region and also created a forecasting model for capacity planning.
2. Recommendation Engine: Using weather and mobile phone data, guest profiles and point of interest ratings, ANTO developed a recommendation engine that helped improve capacity management and contribute to product development and experience design.
3. Energy Management: Using guest profiles, occupancy and environmental data and other structural data sources, ANTO created an energy demand forecast model and integrated it into production and logistics planning, facilitating new pricing models with incentives for improving efficiency.

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AI Concierge

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With this strong desire to innovate, ANTO quickly saw the strong potential to leverage generative AI to improve visitor experiences. They built the Austria Concierge, an AI-powered chatbot to provide visitors with real-time and personalised information. As an experimental tool, it took three months to train the AI, with the Austria Concierge initially launched only on the German language page. However, it is currently available in 10 languages.

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The Austria Concierge improves user engagement by facilitating conversations in natural language, enhancing the travel planning experience. The data is used for supporting the continuous refinement of content and also supports internal creativity among ANTO's different teams, from social media to customer service.

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Driving the development of AI at a national level for the tourism sector supports the cultural shift to a more collaborative, industry-wide mindset by integrating content from Austria's nine federal states for comprehensive information, equating to approximately 12,000 websites and 2,000 Frequently Asked Questions.

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Another of ANTO's pilot projects was the development of Company GPT, aiming to enhance collaboration in tourism through AI. This uses the Large Language Model Chat GPT to tailor AI for tourism's unique needs and solve specific tourism-related challenges. ANTO and their selected partners are supported by Company GPT through a secure IT infrastructure, with no data exchange out of Europe, essential for enhancing data protection, and collaborative prompt sharing to help organisations maximise their efficient use of AI technology to solve their operational needs.