Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Tourism Management and Hospitality
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Experiencing Smart Tourism in the Regions
Erika Zabulionė, Rasa Pranskūnienė
ABSTRACT:
When discussing nowadays tourism, we should notice, that smart tourism has become not only a buzzword, but as well, the strategic priority for tourism development. Here we would like to present two different cases of smart tourism reflecting the meaning of smart tourism. One of the cases is transformed heritage object, the dredger ship “Nemuno 7”, created as a “bugging forest” tourist object of the city of Kaunas as the European Capital of Culture 2022 in the Kaunas district, which fulfills the criteria of creativity, accessibility, digitalization and especially sustainability, when creating smart tourism experiences: instead of scrapping the object, a more sustainable solution has been chosen: to transform it into a cultural space, inviting people to reflect on the theme of water from an artistic, historical or scientific perspective. Another presented example of smart tourism is virtual reality film “Trail of angels” based on the paintings of the famous Lithuanian artist and composer M. K. Čiurlionis. The virtual reality film invites to get acquainted with 60 well-known and easily recognizable and less visible paintings by this famous Lithuanian artist in VR space, as well as showing separate fragments of the paintings: environment, objects, details, lights, sky, earth and accompanied by M. K. Čiurlionis music. This incredible journey, when using VR glasses, could be taken even to the most remote regions, thus fulfilling the mission of the idea of spreading culture and education. Thus, both presented cases show the possibility to create different experiences of smart tourism, opening the essence of tourism – to create indelible experiences and memories.
keywords: Smart tourism, Experience, Digitalization, Sustainability