As part of Festival of Learning in Bournemouth University, eTourismLab held an exciting event titled ‘eTourism Innovations in The Digital Era’ on June 10th, 2013 which attracting around 70 attendees. During this event, members of eTourismLab were showcasing their most recent research ranging from SoLoMo Marketing as a tool for tourism marketing, Social Transformation and ‘Digital Travellers’ generation, Augmented Reality and Gamification, as well as Online Reputation and e-Branding.
As been told by Dimitrios Buhalis, this event is a unique opportunity to engage in the cutting edge research and engage in a dialogue with all stakeholders on how they can use this research to develop their competitiveness and achieve unique experience propositions. He also opened the event by introducing eTourismLab to the audience, who was consists of business people and researchers from tourism and technology fields. Those who could not attend the event, could simply access live streaming by using Ustream and also follow twitter updates by using #BUeTLab.
The event was part into two sessions. In the first half, the topic was focusing on ‘eTourism innovations and tourism and hospitality competitiveness’, with discussion ranging on variety of issues such as SoCoMo-Social Context Mobile Services in Tourism and the EU DIG project as presented by Soultana Symeonidou, Consumer-to-Consumer co-Creation in the Tourism and Event Experience as presented by Ivana Rihova, Active Seniors’ Engagement with Online Media in Their Holiday Purchases as presented by Philip James, as well as as Branding eWOM and Online Reputation as presented by Vicki Loi. Two guest speakers also took part in this event, namely Rowena Revill from Dorset Creative who was presenting on Innovative Applications for Tourism Business and Ramona Wagner from DigitalTourismThinkTank who was explaining on Global Best Practices of e-Destinations. Philip Alford was closing this session with his presentation on Digital Destinations and competitiveness of Small businesses.
After a short coffee break, Nicolas Gregori opened the second session by explained his current research on The Service of Now. In the second half, ‘eTourism Innovations and the future applications and re-engineering of travel experience’ was being the main topic. The other discussion within this topic was stretching from smart tourism cities as presented by Nao Li, gamification in terms of marketing tourism as presented by Feifei Xu and how augmented reality gaming could be implemented in tourism purpose as presented by Jessika Weber. Guest speaker for this session was Liz Gordon from Brilliant Fish who showed the sample of gamification implementation at Corfe Castle. More insightful issues were also placed along in this session, such as how technology enhanced tourist experiences as presented by Barbara Neuhofer and smartphone context-aware augmented reality applications in tourism as presented by Zornitza Yovcheva.
These packs of great presentations had stimulated vibrant and interactive discussions between speakers and audiences. Afterwards, all the speakers, event organisers and participants of the event were seal the day by having drinks and dinner at the Slug and Lettuce Pub as an informal get together.
The Flying Team: It's a wrap!
Here below are some comments on the event:
@mona_wagner: Great presentations about #mobile, co creation, smart cities, eWom and service of now @SchoolofTourism @buhalid #BUeTLab
@beesocialmedia: @buhalid thanks, great event. I’ve been scribbling down notes!
@DorsetCreative: @buhalid great concept on co-creation & experiences that we experience tourism ‘through the eyes of others’ via social media #BUeTLab
@SPLASHRICHMOND: @buhalid @BUFestivals @SchoolofTourism thanks for #BUeTLab today – sharing some AR ‘actual reality’ coming to dest. + attractions soon.
@TruTourism: @buhalid thanks for an excellent afternoon yesterday, well worth coming to. Some great work going on. Look forward to the next one!
@TouristNetwork: @buhalid Thanks for the retweet! Plus your hard work yesterday. Hope to seen you at another Festival of Learning soon!
[Slides from the speakers could be found here]