Why interfaces are no future-oriented solution
The needs of guests and their experiences at a respective destination have to be at the center of attention of every destination management. If you want to provide your guests with a personalized service in the future, you need to know your users digitally. Only if the used system knows the personal interests, customs and click paths of a user, the displayed results can be relevant for him/her.
Future applications in tourism – thanks to artificial intelligence – will be more and more capable of knowing which data a person is interested in and can display said data in a personalized manner. In the long-term, the information retrieval that is easiest to use will prevail. Nobody wants to look through long web texts and search for hours on different websites or apps to find suitable information.
To ensure individualized content, all information must be stored in the same system: both the pool of data provided by tourism as well as the user data of guests. All interfaces that are going to inform guests and answer complex questions in the future (especially via voice-controlled assistants) require a holistic and semantic set of data. Only then does the application get to know the user and evaluates his/her digital footprint in a way that draws conclusions about his/her future behavior.
Interfaces are inconvenient. The touristic websites have been built over several years with a variety of interfaces in order to display data from different sources on one website. However, what is not transferred via the interfaces are all user actions (e.g. clicks, likes, downloads, reviews, etc.) – they simply get lost. But precisely these interactions between user and content are the valuable essence of artificial intelligence. For data protection reasons alone, it will not be possible to transfer the user’s data via interfaces into all systems and back. A general change of thinking is required – tourism destinations need to reduce the number of systems they use. Only then they will play a role in the future of digital communication. Not only is it no fun to maintain content in eight different systems, but it simply makes no sense.