WebinarOnline
The smart tourism revolution: AI, e-tourism and the future of personalised travel experiences
Friday, 18 June 2027
Explore how AI can improve travel services while raising questions about privacy, bias, access and platform power.
About this event
Artificial intelligence and digital platforms increasingly shape how travellers search for destinations, compare services, make bookings and navigate unfamiliar places. This webinar examines recommendation systems, conversational agents and connected visitor services as components of smart tourism. It asks when personalisation improves relevance, accessibility and convenience, and when algorithmic filtering narrows discovery or gives priority to commercial interests. The discussion will treat digital tourism as a system of governance and infrastructure rather than simply a collection of useful consumer applications.
Panellists will examine privacy, informed consent, algorithmic bias, model explainability and unequal access to digital services. They will consider how data are collected across platforms, how inferred preferences affect later recommendations and whether visitors can meaningfully challenge automated outcomes. The session will also address platform power by asking who owns tourism data, which businesses can access digital markets and how the value created from visitor activity is distributed within destinations. Human oversight will be considered in relation to both routine decisions and service failures.
Participants will receive a practical checklist for evaluating whether a digital tourism service is useful, inclusive and accountable. They will learn to identify the purpose of an automated system, assess whether its data practices are proportionate and determine where human judgement remains necessary. The webinar will also introduce questions about procurement, accessibility testing, audit rights and routes for correction. These criteria will help destinations and operators adopt digital innovation without weakening consumer autonomy, local economic participation or public responsibility. This supports innovation while preserving legitimate public oversight.