Messages

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Tourism Trends / What are the key causes of over tourism?

« on: May 30, 2019, 04:01:24 PM »

What are the key causes of overtourism?
There are many contributing factors to overtourism, and of course these will vary from place to place. Airbnb has been used as something of a scapegoat in, as thousands of beds have suddenly been made available in towns and cities around the world, without being subject to any kind of planning, permits or – in many cases – taxes. Hosts can undercut nearby hotels and hostels, rooms open up in already-saturated districts, and as the “home share” concept becomes ever more commercialised, the demand for apartments means that rents are pushed up, and local people are pushed out.

But while Airbnb may have a supporting role, it is far from the leading player. If anything, it is more of a symptom of overtourism that one of the main causes. Local and national governments and tourist boards have long believed that more is better. A “successful” year in tourism is generally considered to be one in which numbers have increased substantially. Never mind whether these numbers are of cruise ship passengers, duty free shoppers, resort guests, backpackers or high end visitors; the number is all that counts. This has resulted in a reluctance – or often outright refusal – to cap numbers in any way, to increase (or introduce) daily tourist taxes, to charge cruise lines for docking, or to try and ensure that tourists’ behaviour is beneficial – or at the very least, not damaging – to local lifestyles and landscapes.

Another issue is the availability of cheap flights, which have saturated Europe in particular in recent years. When it is cheaper to fly from London to Morocco, than to take a train from London to Manchester – then we have a problem. These artificially low fares are only possible thanks to tax and VAT not being charged on aviation fuel, a “subsidy” which saves the industry billions of pounds per year in the UK alone.

Cruise ships, too, are allowed to burn a particularly cheap and polluting type of fuel, which also allows them to keep costs low. And giant cruise ships are another contributing factor when it comes to overtourism. Thousands of passengers spill out into port cities each day, returning to the ship in time for dinner. Passengers often spend very little in the destinations, yet ensure that historic streets, monuments, cafes and shops are rammed with people, creating an unpleasant experience for residents as well as for visitors who may be staying on land and spending money locally.

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Tourism Trends / Why is over tourism in the news now?

« on: May 30, 2019, 04:00:43 PM »

Why is this in the news now?
Visitor numbers have been rising steadily for decades, as anyone who lives in a popular tourist city, or who has visited certain beaches or landmarks, will attest. Currently, there are around two billion tourist arrivals per year – a figure which is growing at a steady six percent.

Overtourism is, therefore, not a new problem. However, while the term itself was coined in 2012, it did not hit the headlines until the summer of 2017. This was not because of the increase in tourist numbers, which had not been particularly dramatic. What made the news in 2017 was the sudden backlash from local residents, which had not happened before on any large scale. There had been a slow drip feed of tourism into cities such as Barcelona, Venice and Dubrovnik, into places one thought of as remote such as Iceland and Skye, and finally, as the balance tipped and this new concept was given a name, the protests spread. There were marches in the streets, graffiti saying “Tourist go home”, and in some cases local authorities responded by increasing fees, refusing to issue permits for more tourist-focused businesses in city centres, and even closing entire islands to visitors. It was these responses which made the news.

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Tourism Trends / Why is Over tourism happening?

« on: May 30, 2019, 04:00:11 PM »

Why is it happening?
The travel industry, like many others, focuses almost exclusively on growth, with little or no concern for the impacts. After decades of virtually uncontrolled growth, it has crossed a threshold: in many destinations, tourism now demonstrably creates more problems than benefits. This can take many forms; perhaps a million additional tourists are arriving in a capital city, or 20 additional tourists in a small, rural community. Overtourism is not just a big city issue; it has been documented in wilderness areas and national parks, and in places such as the Isle of Skye.

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Tourism Trends / What is overtourism?

« on: May 30, 2019, 03:59:47 PM »

What is overtourism?
In short, overtourism occurs when there are too many visitors to a particular destination. “Too many” is a subjective term, of course, but it is defined in each destination by local residents, hosts, business owners and tourists. When rent prices push out local tenants to make way for holiday rentals, that is overtourism. When narrow roads become jammed with tourist vehicles, that is overtourism. When wildlife is scared away, when tourists cannot view landmarks because of the crowds, when fragile environments become degraded – these are all signs of overtourism.

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Tourism Trends / Over tourism

« on: May 30, 2019, 03:59:28 PM »

Since its inception, tourism has been considered a benign activity. This is hardly surprising; the holiday industry’s USP is leisure, enjoyment, a break from all responsibility. It has brought wealth to forgotten rural communities, cushioned the blow of financial crashes, conserved critically endangered species and restored crumbling, historic cities. Tourism’s potential benefits are clear. However, the mistake is to think that it can only bring good. Many of us do not believe this myth, and have been speaking out against it for decades. Our concerns were dismissed, until very recently. In summer 2017, the media and the travel industry finally began to turn their gaze to the negative impacts of the holiday industry, and the term ‘overtourism’ was coined.

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Responsible Tourism / What is Smart Tourism Destination

« on: May 30, 2019, 03:58:04 PM »

What is Smart Tourism Destination
1. A smart tourism destination is one that responds to the requirements of the present global and mobile elites by facilitating access to tourism and hospitality products, services, spaces and experiences through ICT-based tools and where a healthy social and cultural environment can be found through a focus on the city’s social and human capital. On the other hand, it also implements innovative and entrepreneurial businesses and fosters the interconnectedness of businesses.

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Responsible Tourism / What is Smart Tourism Destination

« on: May 30, 2019, 03:57:48 PM »

What is Smart Tourism Destination
1. A smart tourism destination is one that responds to the requirements of the present global and mobile elites by facilitating access to tourism and hospitality products, services, spaces and experiences through ICT-based tools and where a healthy social and cultural environment can be found through a focus on the city’s social and human capital. On the other hand, it also implements innovative and entrepreneurial businesses and fosters the interconnectedness of businesses.

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Tourism & Hospitality Management (THM) / Talking to solar panels

« on: May 30, 2019, 03:55:28 PM »

Talking to solar panels
A facility manager at a large solar farm needed a tool to monitor and control solar panels when away from the computer. A chatbot was designed using SAS® for facility management that analyzes live streaming data from the solar panels.

The facility manager can now ask the chatbot directly about equipment status and each panel’s energy generation, then receive a summary of the energy output by day, month or season. A mobile chat interface extends the capabilities to technicians so they can query the application when they’re outside restarting a panel or monitoring the condition of panels in extreme weather conditions.

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Tourism & Hospitality Management (THM) / Chatbot applications in analytics

« on: May 30, 2019, 03:54:35 PM »

Chatbot applications in analytics
Personal assistants like Siri and Alexa are a complex type of chatbot designed to respond to a wide range of scenarios and queries, from current weather and news updates to personal calendars, music selections and random questions. Chatbots with a specific purpose, like routing customer complaints or inquiries, are designed with a more limited scope of potential answers and replies.

At SAS, we’re developing different ways to incorporate chatbots into business dashboards or analytics platforms. These capabilities have the potential to expand the audience for analytics results and attract new and less technical users.

“Chatbots are a key technology that could allow people to consume analytics without realizing that’s what they’re doing,” says Oliver Schabenberger, SAS Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer. “Chatbots create a humanlike interaction that makes results accessible to all.”

Introducing chatbot functionality into analytics solutions provides a number of capabilities that marry analytics with conversational capabilities:

The chatbot can automatically query and describe large corporate or public data sets.
Users can request summarized or analyzed results verbally by saying, for instance, “Which marketing campaigns are generating the most leads this quarter?”
The chatbot can provide the answer and then offer additional information or suggest a related report to view based on patterns in the data and in previous related queries.
You can ask the chatbot to share the results with others, and that will happen automatically.
You can even combine chatbots with specialized analytics solutions to perform explicit tasks within the application.

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Tourism & Hospitality Management (THM) / How do chatbots work?

« on: May 30, 2019, 03:54:11 PM »

How do chatbots work?
Chatbots communicate through speech or text. Both rely on artificial intelligence technologies like machine learning and natural language processing.

Natural language processing is a branch of artificial intelligence that teaches machines to read, analyze and interpret human language. This technology gives chatbots a baseline for understanding language structure and meaning. NLP, in essence, allows the computer to understand what you are asking and how to appropriately respond.

“Chatbots are programmed to simulate human conversation and exhibit intelligent behavior that is equivalent to that of a human,” says Moore. “With developments in deep learning and reinforcement learning, chatbots can interpret more complexities in language and improve the dynamic nature of conversation between human and machine.”

Essentially, a chatbot tries to match what you’ve asked to an intent that it understands. The more a chatbot communicates with you, the more it understands and the more it learns to communicate like you and others with similar questions. Your positive responses reinforce its answers, and then it uses those answers again.

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Tourism & Hospitality Management (THM) / Defining chatbots

« on: May 30, 2019, 03:53:35 PM »

Chatbots are a form of conversational AI designed to simplify human interaction with computers. Using chatbots, computers can understand and respond to human input through spoken or written language.

“Chatbots can be programmed to respond to simple keywords or prompts, or to hold complex conversations about specific topics,” says Mary Beth Moore, an AI and Language Analytics Strategist at SAS. “They range in complexity from information retrieval using keyword matches to active learning capabilities that provide in-depth responses and tailored suggestions based on previous conversations.”

Many industries use chatbots to improve or streamline customer service and e-commerce. Consider these primary applications for chatbots:

Customer service chatbots: Many businesses are using chatbots as a first contact when customers need help. In almost every industry, companies employ chatbots to help customers easily navigate their websites, answer simple questions and direct people to the relevant points of contact.
E-commerce chatbots: Retail companies and telecommunication providers use chatbots as an additional interaction channel with their customers. The bot is designed to lead customers through a linear process flow to complete requests or transactions.
Virtual assistant chatbots: Personal assistants like Siri, Cortana and Alexa have risen in popularity as their benefits have become readily available and easily embedded into the daily life of consumers. People use them to quickly retrieve information, schedule appointments and interact with smart home features.

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Tourism & Hospitality Management (THM) / Financial institutions seem to have a love/hate relationship with the concept AI

« on: May 30, 2019, 03:51:26 PM »

Financial institutions should embrace several sub-disciplines of AI in combatting fraud and financial crimes. These techniques will allow institutions to more effectively authenticate customers, improve customer experience, and reduce the cost of maintaining acceptable levels of fraud risk, particularly in digital channels.

Machine learning is a proven method that automates some of the supervised learning techniques in areas of fraud, with good training data on fraud events. We’re now seeing these approaches like decision trees, neural networks and GBM models being applied in anti-money laundering to predict “productive events.” Some of the advancements in linguistic analysis and contextual text analytics are proving helpful to automate tasks that have been historically performed manually. Any time you can reduce false positives by 50-70% with automated machine learning strategies, you’re freeing up precious human resources that can focus on more complex and subjective investigations.

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Tourism & Hospitality Management (THM) / IoT in healthcare: Better patient outcomes, lower cost

« on: May 30, 2019, 03:50:12 PM »

These are all examples of how IoT in healthcare allows us to collect granular patient data at frequencies previously unimaginable – not just when people are sick or in a hospital, but where people live and work. This data can be combined with behavioral, physiological, biochemical, genetic, genomic and epigenetic data and more. The volume and scope of the data will make it possible to develop powerful learning and adaptive diagnostic and therapeutic models. Over time, these algorithms will be able to detect new, previously hidden or unknown patterns and relationships between data, diagnoses, treatments and patient outcomes. The result will be next-generation expert systems that will eventually develop a level of autonomy in diagnosis and treatment. Soon, we’ll see them routinely assisting physicians and nurse practitioners, helping them provide high-quality care and achieve better patient outcomes at a lower cost.

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Tourism & Hospitality Management (THM) / big Data :Clinical improvements

« on: May 30, 2019, 03:49:53 PM »

Clinical improvements
Perhaps the greatest opportunities for IoT in healthcare lie in helping clinicians make faster, more accurate diagnoses and more precise, personalized treatment plans. These capabilities can improve outcomes, reduce costs and ultimately provide greater access to high-quality care for more people across the globe. IoT in healthcare technologies can integrate and analyze diverse types of diagnostically relevant data and move it to clinical decision-support systems. Healthcare providers using these systems will have a more complete picture of each patient’s health, as well as the tools to make faster and more precise treatment recommendations. Such opportunities are already being realized in the diagnosis and treatment of sepsis, where speed and accuracy are critical to saving patients’ lives.

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Tourism & Hospitality Management (THM) / Big Data: Operational improvements

« on: May 30, 2019, 03:49:19 PM »

Operational improvements
IoT in healthcare can dramatically optimize workflow and staffing. Even a basic IoT solution can collect and bring together such data as staff location and expertise, patient acuity and location, and availability and location of critical diagnostic and therapeutic equipment. Once modeled, this data can help staffing managers improve workflows and make better staffing and scheduling decisions. The data can also be used to understand the movement of people and assets, and to predict where staffing and equipment will be needed most the next day or in the weeks ahead. Ideally, healthcare facilities will be able to move to appropriate dynamic, on-demand scheduling and resource allocation schemes. This would ensure that the right people are assigned to the right places to efficiently deliver quality care while improving staff morale and patient satisfaction.

Using IoT in healthcare, we can finally begin to tackle the critical problem of alert fatigue in clinical care delivery. This occurs when care providers receive too many clinical alerts – with up to 99 percent of them being false alarms. Alert fatigue is directly responsible for growing numbers of patient injuries and deaths.1

With IoT in healthcare, there are many ways to improve patient care and safety. For example, hospitals can use smart, connected monitoring devices that are linked to patient records, pharmacy systems, room location, nursing staff schedules and more. The sensors in these smart devices collect data, which is integrated with other medical device and system data and then analyzed to determine whether to trigger a silent alarm for a noncritical event or an audible alarm for a life-critical event. In this way, IoT will increase confidence in alarms, reduce work load and drive timely action – keeping patients safer.