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Which are the world’s


smartest cities? Source: Juniper Research


Helsinki are all trying to make life easier for residents through smart applications, as are US cities such as San Francisco and Chicago. All use cutting-edge tech to monitor and improve traffic, safety and other services. Singapore is going one step further and deploying sensors and cameras across the city-state that will allow the government to monitor everything from the density of crowds, to the cleanliness of public spaces, as well as the precise movement of every registered vehicle. However, says Charles Gillmore, CEO of Gillmore Space, a British furniture company that does business in Singapore: “As business travellers and travel buyers, many of us still aren’t aware of what’s available locally – it’s going to be a while before smart tourism takes off.”


TRANSPORTS OF DELIGHT When it comes to smart tourism services, one sector is leading the vanguard: trans- portation: “I do think real-time data around traffic flows and congestion can help buyers be smarter,” says Charuta Fadnis, senior director, research and intelligence, at BCD Travel. “Knowing executives have to be at a certain place at a certain time, and plot- ting the best and fastest route to get there and what’s the best mode or combination of transportation, can all contribute to an enhanced experience and ease friction.”


Travel managers are increasingly looking at how they can enhance their executives’ wellbeing. Connecting smart city services to mobile apps will soon be part of this process. “So, when a city offers a connected platform, travel managers can communicate things like hotel options, transportation alterna- tives or weather,” explains Fadnis. Smart cities or destinations with a disas- ter or crisis warning system in place could also help travel managers and their TMCs fulfil their duty-of-care obligations and give travellers the help they need quickly and efficiently. Information could be fed


also get personalised information about the services they are looking for. For a meeting or event planner, information about a venue in real- or near-real-time is an advantage. They can look at meeting venues, intra-city travel, restaurants and places of interest.


FROM THE GROUND UP


Already there are start-ups and applications that are trying to join up travel services in a smarter way for destinations. For instance, Mozio aggregates all ground transportation providers into a single platform so you can seamlessly combine taxi and train services.


“Citizens of various cities are also starting to share their data”


back from the emergency services from incidents, again in real-time. We also think of these smarter services coming from a centralised source – for example, from government or industry. However, citizens of various cities are also starting to share their data, allowing smart tourism services to proliferate. For instance, the Going Local Berlin app uses crowd-sourced information about the city. As more data gets shared, business travellers can


‘Safety is top of the agenda’


SMART TOURISM SEEMS TO BE MORE CONCERNED about local infrastructure at the moment and helping local populations, rather than prioritising visiting business travellers. It is clear we are in the very early stages of these smart initiatives. What comes to the fore is the wide interpretation of what smart tourism is – it can mean many things in different destinations. Therein lies the problem for the executive traveller – at the moment there is no consistency in what’s being offered. Therefore, a visitor cannot easily benefit from so-called smart destinations. In the future, however, we are going to benefit from big data and its applications.


Take, for example, cities like Santander in Spain. It has installed 20,000 sensors around the city connecting buildings and services to track things like traffic flow and people movement, and there’s much more information than has previously been made available. Much of this should improve business visits, as well as benefit local communities, of course. In some ways this could be seen ominously like the oppressive hand of Big Brother, but in this day and age of global terrorism, safety is top of the agenda.


Ken McLeod, corporate director at Advantage Travel Partnership BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM BBT September/October 2016 111


“This platform allows travel distributors to sell their content to travellers, who then prepay and receive instant confirmation,” says Gregoire Boutin, director, innova- tion management systems, at Carlson Wagonlit Travel. “We’ve also integrated Uber in to the CWT To Go app – all book- ings are recorded, allowing spend to be tracked easily.”


The only issue with the potential rise of smart tourism is the lack of consistency across cities – the last thing you want to do is download and plug in to a myriad of dif- ferent apps, services and systems. “The risk is that the fragmented smart-city market will require too much local knowledge to truly have an impact on business travellers,” states Hillgate Travel’s Boatwright. Initiatives like Open and Agile Smart Cities (OASC) and City SDK, which allow sharing, will be crucial to adoption by travellers. On a more basic level the biggest frustra- tion for business travellers is still connection to wifi – it’s a major bugbear. The need to be continually connected to the internet is without question the one improvement that executive travellers would finally like solved once and for all. So destinations should consider that maybe the quickest win in the provision of smart tourism is the simple provision of free wifi for all. Now that would be a smart start.


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Singapore Barcelona London


San Francisco Oslo


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