Minsait Helps Create Safe, Competitive And Sustainable Destinations To Promote Tourism Recovery
Minsait, an Indra company, has redesigned its range of smart tourism solutions aimed at helping cities and regions develop safe, competitive, and sustainable tourist destinations to cope with new post-pandemic challenges and implement resilience plans in certain areas, such as job creation, new health and climate risks management, and urban sprawl.
The Covid-19 crisis is adversely affecting the economy, especially the tourism industry. Before the health crisis, Spain was ranked as the second leading tourist destination in the world after France, with 83.7 million foreign visitors to the country in 2019.
Spain derives 12% of its GDP from the tourism industry, which provides 2.6 million people with employment. However, from an optimistic point of view, when returning to activity this summer, estimated losses of more than €70 billion are forecast throughout the country, according to industry sources. The opening of the borders to visitors from other countries on June 21 is an important challenge from multiple points of view.
According to Alberto Bernal, the Business Development Manager of Smart Cities at Minsait, “the recovery of tourism involves the implementation of revaluation models for destinations with new promotion and relationship channels that facilitate a 360º vision of the tourist, the integration of the digital world with the physical one to manage different spaces in real time, and the use of advanced analytical techniques to extract value from the tourists’ interactions and anticipate their needs, all as part of a resilience strategy that will enable recovery from external stresses”.
Onesait Government Tourism, the Minsait platform that provides solutions to meet current and future needs in the smart and resilient management of tourist destinations, facilitates the implementation of this new model with an approach based on intelligence and the use of data.
“The recovery of the travel sector will hinge on generating transparency and trust in order that tourists will visit us once more. The contribution of technology is, therefore, very important since it provides customized knowledge about travelers and their demands to provide them with an experience that makes them feel that they are being looked after and safe during the trip and their stay at the destination,” explains Alberto Bernal.
Integrated destination management
By interoperable and open solutions, Onesait Government Tourism enables the integration of all the participants and systems into a collaboration model between the private sector and public authorities to generate confidence in visitors, enhance the reputation of tourist destinations, and facilitate the definition and implementation of necessary measures that enhance products, channels, resources, services, and infrastructures and offer all kinds of assurances against any crisis
Among other benefits, Onesait Government Tourism facilitates the adaptation of tourists to the region, strengthens visitors’ health safety in tourist resorts, reduces cultural heritage maintenance costs, and facilitates event planning by predictive analytics and scenario simulations. It also boosts the local economy by facilitating the development of packages from different companies and the subsequent commercialization to generate an attractive proposition.
According to Alberto Bernal, the platform stands out for the unified management of all the destination aspects, “from monitoring and operation to tourism promotion,” the distributed intelligence system to get the most out of the data by “analyzing tourist flows in real time to increase security and offer customized propositions to each visitor,” and the destination productivity that “has a direct impact on the local economy”.
Onesait Government Tourism has an extensive portfolio of solutions based on sensors, apps, beacons and cameras, among others, that provide each destination with smart resilience to meet specific needs in certain areas, such as people counting, preventive maintenance of heritage, new interaction and promotion channels, tourism attraction and diversification, offer portals, local services, and tourism intelligence.
Solutions with impact
Smart tourism destination solutions implemented by Minsait in Spain and Italy are among the best in their class internationally for having very positive impacts on local economies. In Galicia, the Smart project named Camiño has fostered the launch of a digital platform with mobile applications to guide and resolve all the information needs of pilgrims that visit the Camino de Santiago (known in English as the Way of St. James), resulting in a 68.5% increase in the number of website users in 2018 (www.caminodesantiago.gal).
Similarly, estimates suggest that the “Cáceres Patrimonio Inteligente” heritage project could result in a 5% increase in the number of overnight stays and visitors and a 10% increase in employment in the sector. In addition, the project named “Las Palmas Inteligencia Azul” has demonstrated great efficiency in the sustainable management of urban services, resulting in a 15% reduction in the running costs of green areas and gardens, among others.
In Italy, Minsait has developed the portals, applications, and web systems of the Apulia Region, as well as the cultural portal of the Campania Region to facilitate access to different assets and services of the digital ecosystem in both territories. The company is also a key partner in the Vatican Museums digitalization whose aim is to integrate services to improve the protection of works of art and visitor safety.