Grigory Pavlov
for EcoToutism Expert 
Companies developing digital solutions for the tourism industry may have an opportunity to receive government support as early as 2024, if the decision is finally made to create an Industrial Competence Center in the tourism sector. At least, the representatives of the tourism industry and parliamentarians have begun to jointly and actively work in this area. This topic was discussed at the round table with the participation of the senators, representatives of the tourism industry associations, IT companies and travel aggregators.
Natalya Osipova, vice-president of the National Union of the Hospitality Industry, stated that software developers for the tourism industry were limited at present in receiving grant support. “The companies producing innovative software in various sectors of the economy can apply for grants under the Digital Economy national project through their participation in the competitions held by the Industrial Competence Centers. But none of them are currently working in the tourism sector.” According to her, IT in the tourism industry requires support all the more because - due to sanctions and restrictions - it’s difficult to use old proven methods of promotion and optimization on the Internet or they do not work at all.
She believes that the tourism industry should undoubtedly receive new advanced digital tools to be able to develop. “This applies to promoting the tourism services and updating the operational services. There are already a number of interesting high-tech projects in the tourism sector that can be implemented if they receive the state support,” said Natalya Osipova.
The Travel Constructor project is among the ones presented during the round table discussions. The platform was developed by the SoftLabs company in collaboration with the representatives of the Sakhalin Region as a prototype of a united state aggregator for managing tourist flows that is combined with the portals of regional tourist information centers. “This is a kind of social network for the tourism industry - people can register, give some information about their trips and post photos, as well as communicate and receive many recommendations from other users and the offers from tour operators,” said Mikhail Perlovich, the company’s director general.
The platform can be combined with regional tourism departments, marketplaces selling tours, and tourism services, which allows it to have the relevant latest information; it is also open for integration with all social networks. “The project is useful for individual travelers giving them an opportunity to independently plan their trips and choose the most advantageous offers. The main thing is that people can create routes that are of interest to them and receive useful recommendations from artificial intelligence that are based on their preferences,” said a company representative. According to him, the platform created thanks to using public-private partnership mechanisms will increase awareness, make it easier for travelers to receive the benefits and additional discounts, improve reliability and give a chance to make their trips longer.
The round table attendees noted that today, the lack of information is among the significant barriers to traveling. In almost 25 percent of cases, tourists abandon their plans to travel to a particular city or region at the planning stage because they are not sure to be able to find interesting attractions and activities there.
Venera Rovenskaya, the head of the National Union of the Hospitality Industry’s Digitalization Committee, member of the Expert Council of the State Duma’s Committee on Tourism, told that there were official tourism portals in almost every region, but so far, they were informational ones only. Meanwhile, the creation of platforms combining these resources with marketplaces will give all the travelers a complete picture of opportunities by combining the information about hotels, transport, cultural facilities, catering, trade and entertainment, and will also ultimately increase the transparency of the tourism industry, ensuring the coming out of small and micro-businesses of the shadows. She notes a successful startup in this area in the Yaroslavl Region; a similar automated solution is now under development for the city of Anapa.
Timofey Makarov from the WHAT ELSE company that has already implemented the Visit Siberia project together with the Siberian Agreement interregional association spoke about a new promising development - The Fellow Traveler, a multifunctional service for road travelers. The plans are to create a mobile application to be voice-controlled by users, which is convenient for tourists and necessary for drivers. It is envisaged that a user, when necessary, will be able to use a voice-access to the application that will constantly work in the background mode, and drivers can use pushing and notifications as well. It is possible to use the application without Internet access, which is especially important in remote areas.
Now, when motor vehicles are becoming the most affordable type of family tourism, there is a lack of information on car tourism routes and a lack of routes’ evaluation for end consumers, the round table attendees noted. This interferes with the population mobility and slows down the tourism industry development.
Meanwhile, the proposed project provides an opportunity for users to choose an already developed route or create their own one, evaluate it in the rating system and ‘share’ it with their friends based on the results of the trip. “The route is worked out depending on the location of attractions; the users will be able to easily receive convenient and, most importantly, personal information based on a historical, ethnic and cultural content. People can download the content that is of interest to them, and the system can find real places corresponding to it and offer several travel destinations. The project involves the formation of a route map, the creation of a neural network and ‘teaching’ it,” said the representative of the developer’s company.
Natalya Osipova noted that the lack of high-quality tourism industry analytics is another problem. Now, neither the Rosstat’s (Federal State Statistics Service) figures nor the large aggregators’ data show the ‘portrait’ (characteristics) of a tourist; there is no information on who is traveling: a man, a woman or a family; accordingly, the regions have no understanding of what hotels, rooms, and services will be in demand.
“A unified digital space for tourism sector is required where the information on tourist flows from the regions, Rosstat, aggregators, and telecom operators can come to be correctly and, most importantly, consistently interpreted. There are no methodological recommendations now from the Government on how to evaluate this information. Each region has its own data on different parameters that does not correlate in any way; so far, it is practically impossible to compare the figures, including from the point of view of the tourism industry development in the regions.”
Nikita Korostelyov from Tutu.ru said that the aggregator has already gained experience in systematizing the big data accumulated over many years. “Together with the Ministry for Development of Russian Far East, the Traveldata portal has been created where the data on the Arctic and Far Eastern regions is collected. “You can see where tourists are coming from, track the dynamics of the tourist flow and the tourist rating of each region, get the information about popular tour operators, main tourism anchors, create a travel itinerary and plan a trip from different Russian cities taking into account ticket prices and seasonal hotel occupancy rates,” said the company’s representative.
He noted that using the Traveldata portal’s figures, the regions can see their tourism dynamics, and investors can see the areas promising for investment. In addition, the platform generates an electronic ‘portrait’ of a tourist taking into account the tourist’s gender, age, education, as well as his or her preferences and stereotypical ideas.
Konstantin Markov, head of the Tourism department in the Sber bank’s ecosystem noted that the digital ‘portrait’ of a tourist could become even more clear if the information from banks and payment systems was used in the analysis. According to him, a very detail information is available today, for example, their bank analysts have found out that the Muscovites prefer German cuisine when traveling, rather than an Italian one, as it was previously thought. “Over the past three years, large amounts of data have become available, sufficient for taking financial decisions and making forecasts. A number of regions are already using the big data from the Sber bank to build the development strategies for their regions, as well as to develop the projects financed on the basis of the state support,” said the bank’s representative. Based on the transactions, the Sber bank calculated the importance of the tourism sector for the regional economy. “Every ruble spent on tourism can be used in 50 related industries, and one job in the tourism sector creates 5 jobs additionally.”
As a result of the round table discussions, the participants agreed with the Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Digital Development, and the Information Technology Development Fund, to jointly speed up taking the decision to create an Industrial Competence Center that will become a tool for supporting such promising technological solutions in the tourism industry, said Senator Andrey Khapochkin.
He said that under the Committee on Social Policy, it is also planned to set up a working group consisting of the parliamentarians, representatives of departments and stakeholders on the digitalization of the tourism industry, the interaction between participants in the tourism industry and the initiation of legislative decisions relevant to the tourism industry. The legislative definition of a tourism aggregator is one of them, it was proposed by the representatives of the tourism industry. The absence of this legislative definition, in particular, makes it impossible to use travel aggregators in involving the operating guest houses in active legal circulation; the state tries to bring guest houses out of the shadows - at present, it is being done at the level of conducting an experiment in several tourism regions.
During the round table discussions, the representatives of the Russian State University of Tourism and Service expressed their interest in training tourism personnel in advanced digital competencies. To make the digital tomorrow come as soon as possible, acquisition of digital competencies can be part of retraining and advanced training projects rather than through a higher education program.
