Maximizing the potential of mining tourism through knowledge infrastructures

Abstract

The proposed paper deals with different approaches to the issue of shortage of relevant customer behavior data and key performance indicators for evaluating and planning for mining tourism. Mining tourism's offer is concentrated in tourist destinations emerging from tourist sub-regions or other areas of interest that by unwritten rules may or may not copy administrative boundaries of NUTS 5 areas. Management of mining tourism's offer is a part of destination management organizations' processes, which within their planning are dependent on huge amounts of data as key components of their knowledge infrastructure. In Slovakia, the issue of knowledge infrastructures in tourism is approached by the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) with redeemable value to the national economy and published only as an informative report. On the other hand, regarding tourism destination management on the principles of knowledge-based economy, publicly available statistics at levels of NUTS 4-5 do not have an exact information value regards to the performance of mining tourism's offer. These facts cause lack of effective support of mining tourism in Slovakia and create significant barriers in information cooperation of tourism stakeholders. Data management and analysis may be challenging to tourism stakeholders. Information technologies offer advanced features as detection of qualitative patterns and hidden dependencies as well as the possibility of continuous study of destination's KPI evolution. Different examples around the world show that information collected in ICT knowledge infrastructures can be used as intelligent decision support tools. The tools can connect tourism and mining tourism stakeholders into a system based on knowledge and provide them with solutions to complex problems without having deep technical expertise. The results show that the issued problematic of data shortage in destination management could be solved through implementation of destination business information systems based on continuous information cooperation of relevant state authorities and stakeholders. The group of authors are members of a research team currently working on a project with the aim of developing an interactive business intelligence system for the support of complex decision making and planning in tourism market conditions of the Kosice county.

Keywords

• KPI
• DSS
• DBIS
• DMIS
• TSA
• open data
• mining tourism
• destination management