The Knowledge Destination II – collaboration project with Destination Halland 2020

Destination Halland 2020 aims to create long-term sustainable tools and models for collaboration in the tourism and hospitality industry. This project will develop a digital platform to give the industry an increased knowledge of the guest's behavior and needs.

Competitiveness of tourism destinations strongly depends on how information needs of stakeholders can be satisfied through ICT-based infrastructures and services. Information and communication technologies (ICTS) play a crucial role to increase the knowledge base of destination stakeholders. Organizational learning and managerial effectiveness can particularly be enhanced by applying methods of business intelligence (BI).

Although huge amounts of data are available in tourism destinations these valuable knowledge sources typically remain unused. Web servers store tourists’ website navigation behavior, data bases store transaction and survey data, and CRM data bases store customer profiles and preferences. However, the possibilities of modern information technology for business intelligence and decision support are not used adequately.

The project “Halland 2020 - DMIS” tackles this problem by a novel destination management information system (DMIS) that applies methods of BI and data warehousing for the Swedish tourism destination, Halland.

The project has prototypically developed a data architectur for a variety of data sources with structured and un-structured data, ETL processes for extracting data into a data warehouse and applyed data mining and knowledge generation methods such as topic and sentiment detection and analysis of customer survey data. The prototype has also developed a graphical user interface and a technical architecture.