Or should become it. It seems to be clear that modern tourism is not about just going from A to B, it is about exploring and getting new experience, in other words – receiving new cultural code. The origin of this code is museums as the only place keeping authentic cultural and historical heritage. The problem is that museums are not represented on the Internet as well as modern world requires, considering the fact that museum visitor is often a foreign tourist. Why is it so? In most cases it is due to financial factors causing lack of specialists and low salaries. Perhaps, tourist authorities and DMO worldwide could help museums to attract more finance and to fill the gap in knowledge and qualified specialists. Why DMO? Because museums could be an attractor for tourists, especially smart tourists who prefer to explore the destination rather than lying on the beach. May be you could offer the solution of museums’ bad representation on the Internet?

Why it is necessary? The answer is simple. The term “mobile traffic” speaks for itself. This traffic comes from a device which uses a person, possibly, locating near your business. If you provide tourist or entertainment services and you want to attract tourists – mobile website is necessary. There is no tourist walking around a city and searching museum or restaurant in a laptop. Besides, mobile Internet completely differs from desktop in that you don’t have to wait while your computer turns on. This traffic causes making fast and impetuous decisions. If a tourist sees on his map that there is something interesting nearby and visits your mobile website – there is a high chance of visiting your office. Speaking of cold and hot traffic – this is exactly a hot customer.    Apart from attracting tourists nearby, attract them on the stage of preparing to travel. A lot of people prefer to search tours and tickets using mobile device while going somewhere, staying in line or havin

In recent years, Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies are widely used in tourism together with introducing innovations in all social scene. In our opinion, we need to understand where it is necessary and where it would prevent developing of real smart tourism as VR and AR do not turn a city or museum into smart in a snap. Moreover, VR and AR deflect tourist’s attention from receiving real cultural patterns of destination or museum. He can use VR or AR any time at home, but during a travel he wants to see true authentic objects. In addition, these technologies have notable disadvantages.  • Need for huge Internet traffic. Often, tourists use Internet very carefully as costs may be high.  • Need for special equipment. In a high stream of tourists, VR and AR glasses have to be aseptisized, and probably, changed quite often.  • High costs. It is diversion of museum and destination resources to unimportant things instead of doing necessary things e.g. solvi

A lot of tourist companies try to use chat bots offering and booking a tour or requset response. Partly, chat bots help to relieve sales departments. However, the main selling tool of tourism is trust and professionalism as a tour is quite expensive product which is bought once or twice a year and not every tourist would trust a bot to buy a tour. Besides chat bots are not perfect and not able to emotionally describe a destination. That’s why using a chat bot as a first contact with customers could be risky. Moreover, a while ago Skyscanner and OneTwoTrip started to use chat bots but then refused them which is food for thought. A customer buying a tour is ready to get new emotions and impresions. He also wants to get emotions from a tour seller when bots are not able to provide it. It is too early to make conclusions, chat bots develop really fast but we would recommend heads of tourist companies to think carefully before introducing them into your business. 

Standard sales tunnel for different products is a well studied AIDA. A — Attention I — Interest D — Desire A — Action Though in tourism this tunnel can be improved to increase conversion by transforming into AIDAS where S for Satisfaction. Why tourism? Because nowadays people share their impressions from a travel with others, positive or negative. Thanks to development of the Internet impressions can be shared with thousands and millions. Choosing a destination, accommodation and transport a prospective traveler rely on reviews on Tripadvisor or Google Maps. But this is only on the one hand. On the other hand people take seriously buying a travel than, for example, new sports shoes as they have vacation once or twice a year, it costs a lot of money, it is complicated to return it etc. In our opinion, this is exactly why destinations, museums, hotels and tourist companies should completely transform their sales tunnel into AIDAS.

Smart tourist can easily find and book air tickets and hotels without leaving home, then go traveling using mobile applications, and not polluting environment with paper waste like maps and guidebooks. Thanks to digital technologies, logistic aspect of traveling fades into insignificance.  The fact is that tourism itself has changed. Now tourism becomes a tool for cultural interchange, learning history, and from the sphere of entertainment it goes to discovery. Basically, considering the term “smart” there is no surprise in such transforming. Modern tourist becomes more curious and thirsty for discoveries since logistic tasks are easily solved by technologies. In our opinion smart tourism is much wider – it defines not only service sale but identify a personality of a tourist and completely new policies of providing tour service.  It is time to understand that tourist cares more about fast and cheap Internet than luxury apartments, and he wants hotels, restaurants an

Modern world faces a case when the number of technology and startups significantly exceeds the demands of tourists. Sometimes it’s as if a lot of new technologies are made not for tourists but for sponsorship and profit.  It would be fine if these technologies did not take resources of museums and destinations which could be spent on more relevant requests of travelers. What do we think a tourist needs first? Based on our experience we made the list of things museums and destinations should provide first: 1. Internet access Cheap and fast mobile Internet Free Wi Fi 2. Storytelling of sights in different languages i.e. free platform izi.TRAVEL Downloadable museum audioguides in different languages Sightseeing automatic GPS audio tours 3. Accessible information on routes and timetable of public transport Public transport applications Buying online tickets 4. Buying online tickets to events and museums 5. Availability and informal answers on Tripadvisor

Our vision of smart tourism, also known as e-tourism or intelligent tourism, differs from the common. Commonly smart tourism is defined as hi-tech stuff like: • Marketing tools to increase hotel and air ticket sales • Innovations to promote objects and destinations, i.e. VR, AR • More accurate statistics to complete marketing challenges of destinations, hotels and other stakeholders. All of this involve difficult schemes, huge number of statistics and trendy terms which make it seem hard or even impossible to understand for a casual traveler. Meanwhile, for the last decade smart tourism is being discussed only in academic environment but still not clear. However, in our opinion the definition of smart tourism has to be reconsidered, not to increase industry sales or complicate technologies but to provide new services for any traveler. It is true that nowadays any tourist can book a hotel, air ticket or tour without leaving home and during the travel he doesn’t need a