Augmenting Retail Data With Open Data for Smarter Tourism Destinations

The current tourism landscape intertwines physical and digital realms, giving rise to smart tourism. This paradigm shift leverages technology, generating large amounts of data from sensors and mobile devices, offering vast opportunities for strategic tourism planning and management. Smart tourism destinations (STDs) are pivotal in this context, utilising technology to enhance visitor experiences and facilitate informed decision-making through proficient data management. Within this framework, open data emerges as a crucial aspect. This study aims to demonstrate how combining open data with a local business campaign data can innovate tourism management and foster smart ecosystems. This approach facilitates public-private collaboration and strengthens STD models at various administrative levels. A novel search engine was used to identify suitable open data for integration, employing word embeddings to perform semantic searches and enhance traditional data retrieval methods. The findings highlight the potential of open data in supporting the tourism industry. Integrating open and proprietary data not only enriches tourist experiences but also informs destination management strategies. The contributions of this work enable STDs to enhance the decision-making process by 1) demonstrating the feasibility of integrating retail data and open data for tourism management; 2) describing an AI-based data search engine for discovering open data relevant to STDs; and 3) presenting and discussing new findings on the use of retail data in conjunction with external open data in a real case study.