IFITTtalk@Östersund on Big Data & Business Intelligence in Travel & Tourism Domain

Östersund, Sweden – April 11-12, 2016

Photos of the workshop can be found here.
Watch IFITT Hangout on air here.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are widely adopted in the tourism domain. Therefore, information on nearly all tourism transactions, customer needs and behaviour, as well as the complete tourism market structure are electronically available. The domains of Big Data and Business Intelligence deal with the extraction of such information from different data sources and source systems, the analysis of usually huge sets of data by techniques spanning from interactive visualizations to complex data mining methods, like machine learning, thereby gaining new knowledge as input to decision support or intelligent and adaptive systems, such as recommender systems. Business Intelligence and Big Data are just about to unfold their full potential for the tourism domain. Due to the crucial role and importance of social media and online product reviews in tourism, the above trends become vital for tourism companies to ensure organisational competitiveness. Powerful ICT systems and new machine learning algorithms, especially in the field of web content mining and text mining, enable new applications for Business Intelligence methods which, in turn, are gaining high research momentum. Behind this background, an international research workshop titled ‘Big Data & Business Intelligence in the Travel & Tourism Domain’ was organized by the European Tourism Research Institute (ETOUR), Mid-Sweden University, Sweden in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten, Germany. The event, scheduled on 11-12 April 2016, was supported by the International Federation for Information Technology and Travel & Tourism (IFITT), thus, branded as IFITTtalk@Östersund. The workshop goals were to

• share experiences and expectations towards Big Data and Business Intelligence in travel and tourism and discuss ongoing research among international scholars
• discuss trends of Business Intelligence and Big Data in travel and tourism and to identify knowledge gaps and promising research topics
• reflect critical issues, such as consequences for theory development of data-driven (inductive) knowledge generation, the risk of surveillance of the civic society

Over 20 internationally renowned scholars from 10 different countries working in the domain of Big Data & Business Intelligence and Tourism followed the invitation to attend IFITTtalk@Östersund. The extended abstracts included in the Workshop Proceedings, together with the Journal of Information Technology’s Special Issue on Business Intelligence and Big Data in the Travel and Tourism domain (Höpken & Fuchs, 2016) cover different facets of current research activities within the field of Business Intelligence and Big Data and give a comprehensive insight into current research and future challenges in this fascinating research field. We’d like to express our gratitude to all the participants of the successful IFITTtalk@Östersund workshop on Big Data & Business Intelligence in the Travel & Tourism Domain for their valuable contributions and insightful discussions. Especially, we also would like to thank IFITT for the valuable support of IFITTtalk@Östersund.

The organizers
Prof. Matthias Fuchs, ETOUR, Mid-Sweden University, Sweden
PhD Maria Lexhagen, ETOUR, Mid-Sweden University, Sweden
Prof. Wolfram Höpken, University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten, Germany