Germany - Challenges such as advancing climate change, crises and the increasing

Description

Challenges such as advancing climate change, crises and the increasing shortage of skilled workers are placing huge demands on the tourism industry. Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) also pose major challenges for the sector, but also offer opportunities. The technological upheaval will fundamentally change established processes, structures and consumer and information behavior. Tourismus NRW and its partners want to play a pioneering role in the establishment of AI in German tourism. Smart use cases should make it possible to provide guests with exactly the content they need at any given moment. The "Tourism Data Intelligence Initiative NRW" funding project aims to develop the travel destination into a sustainable and smart destination. The focus is on the use of innovative AI, which should not only increase the attractiveness and experience of tourism in the region, but also enable a more precise and individualized service for guests' information needs. To this end, AI-controlled services such as an AI-based experience planner are to be tested and implemented.
A coordinated database and state-wide data and content management serves as the basis for such innovative applications. The Data Hub NRW is a data hub with a holistic open data approach that bundles tourism data from the entire federal state in order to provide guests with tourism information quickly and easily, regardless of the distribution channel. All tourist regions in NRW are connected to it. The Data Hub NRW is a relational database. The basic content was integrated into the Data Hub via interfaces and a wide variety of data types (hosts, points of interest, tours & routes, gastronomy, events) were combined on one platform. The Data Hub NRW has thousands of decentralized, openly licensed data records. The data is subject to the quality standards of the Data Hub NRW and is partly available in English and Dutch.
A key work package in the "Tourism Data Intelligence Initiative NRW" project is the creation of a digital image of North Rhine-Westphalia as a travel destination with a focus on the key themes of cultural and nature tourism and the night-time economy. In order to realize the digital image, new and external data sources are to be included in the Data Hub NRW. The majority of the data in the "Hosts" area is already available in digital form; in January 2025, around 2,500 openly licensed accommodation data will be available in the Data Hub NRW. Compared to the results on booking or rating portals, this only covers a fraction of the number of all accommodation establishments in North Rhine-Westphalia. For this reason, the master data of the accommodation establishments in NRW (see Chapter 4.2 "Static data") is to be connected to the tourism booking portals via website scraping, processed and delivered to the Data Hub NRW.
Dynamic data will also be integrated. This includes dynamic occupancy and price data from accommodation providers. In addition to official statistics, this data will be used to record and analyze demand in accommodation establishments. The advantage of collecting dynamic data is seen in the fact that estimates of occupancy and pricing can not only be made at short notice after a period of time, but also a forecast for future periods is possible. The use of dynamic data from tourism booking platforms will probably also lead to the data pool exceeding that of official statistics, thus providing a more complete picture of the accommodation sector.

Opportunity closing date

13 February 2025

Value of contract

to be confirmed