On Wednesday 14th November, Dimitrios Buhalsi presented at the 6th Obiettivo Turismo.
The Obiettivo Turismo is an event created to discuss timely and significant issues of concern for tourism in Ticino, Switzerland.
This year the programme, offered to all operators and tourism partners, time for reflection and debate, urging them to discuss important tourism issues.
The 2012 edition has particularly focused on the theme of understanding a variety of applications of tourism. The event’s Special guest was Hon. Federal Councillor Johann Schneider of Ammann.
The first part of this half day event, entitled “Time for innovation” featured welcoming speeches mainly by local body representatives.
Dimitrios’ presentation entitled “The New Media in Tourism Marketing” gained a lot of attention.
During his speech Dimitrios underlined the incredible opportunities for dynamic engagement with all stakeholders and travellers brought by social media.
It was indicated that user generated content can provide inspirational material to encourage more travellers to consider destinations and tourism products and to become part of the travel decision making.
Lastly the future of tourism was discussed, which lies in interactive and ambient technologies that will enable us to interact dynamically with our environment, with Context Based Services and Augmented Reality being two critical technologies that will develop incredible opportunities for tourism organisations and destinations to promote their products at real time and interact dynamically with travellers to optimise tourism experience through co-creation.
The second part of the event, “Not only tourism”, was organized in collaboration with the Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Craft and services of the Canton Ticino (CC-I) and featured the roundtable Alessandra Tedeschi Toschi, Co-Director of the Observatory on Tourism of Laghi and Marketing Professor at the University of Milan and Lorenzo Leoni, Director of the ACT Foundation and Managing Partner at Agire Invest, who discussed the use and application of innovation in sectors other than tourism.