Innovative tourism ecosystems in Puglia: meeting with the stakeholders of the project CI-NOVATEC

11/03/2020 News

Innovative tourism ecosystems in Puglia: meeting with the stakeholders of the project CI-NOVATEC

In the frame of the project CI-NOVATEC “Customer Intelligence for inNOVAtive Tourism ECosystems” financed by the CBC Programme INTERREG V-A Greece-Italy 2014/2020, Puglia Region – Department of Tourism, Economy of Culture and Valorization of Territory is developing new techniques and innovative technologies for the collection of data related to the tourist experience to improve the performance of the regional tourism system.

In order to inform the involved parties (touristic and cultural operators, SMEs, etc.) on the project and its activities, Puglia Region in collaboration with its in-house company InnovaPuglia organized a meeting on 03 March 2020 with the local stakeholders of Monte Sant’Angelo, one of the three pilot areas chosen by Puglia Region to develop new "tourism ecosystems" at micro-region level.

After a brief presentation on CI-NOVATEC and its objectives, participants gained detailed knowledge of “Puglia Data Management System (DMS)”, a platform to manage and promote tourism and culture in Puglia. DMS, whose community involves both operators and end-users, represents a unique access tool to the Tourism and Culture Ecosystem in Puglia. Thanks to CI-NOVATEC, this platform will be further upgraded, collecting experience-based data from visitors, which will be used to facilitate business and political decisions in order to create added value for the local ecosystem of tourism.

The CI-NOVATEC project consortium consists of five beneficiaries. The Lead Partner of the project is Region of Western Greece and, in addition to Puglia Region - Tourism, Economy of Culture and Valorization of Territory, the other partners are: Chamber of Commerce of Bari, the University of Patras - Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Region of Epirus (Greek Beneficiaries). Furthermore, associated partners of the project are the Chamber of Commerce of Achaia and the Chamber of Commerce of Brindisi.

The objective of the project is to focus on Local Tourism Clusters (LTCs), which are one of the most important factors for strengthening local economies within the cross-border area. These Clusters are comprised of geographically concentrated Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and provide services to the same client (or a group of customers), namely the visitor, but they may belong to a variety of sectors such as tourism, creative industries, nutrition, commerce, leisure, transport, etc.