In Europe there is a lack of Big Data players in quite all domain. Specifically, in the Tourism domain the European enterprises are subsidiaries from the US big players. Generally recognized as reliable, up-to-date and qualified, public tourist data remained difficult to access: a multitude of collectors, scattered databases, heterogeneous formats and contents, complex re-use methods. The challenge is to make this data more accessible by proposing data sets standardized and reusable by all. In addition, the legal obligations to open up data, which apply to public actors, have encouraged tourism organisations to go even further in this process: it was necessary not only to disseminate its data widely, but also to make them “reference data”. Qualifying the data, standardizing its format to make it interoperable, simplifying the procedures for reuse using new legal tools, have become the other major characteristics of all the data tourism sets.

Problem and Description

The digital tourism market is largely in the hands of a handful of the major non-EU players. These online tourism agencies (OTAs) are a danger due to their business model and aggressive strategy. They prevent a fair and sustainable development of tourism supply in the context of an open market such as that of the European Union.
In the mountain segment, the French Ski School (ESF), with its 220 Ski Schools and 17,000 instructors, is the only common denominator capable of bringing together the economic and social eco-system of French mountain tourism. Every year, the ESF trains 2,5 million people in the French ski area, or nearly one in five skiers. There is no other organization capable of bringing each tourism actors around the table to build an open, sustainable and fair marketplace. It also maintains good relations with the major tour operators.
The problem that the ESF must overcome is the highly fragmented environment with a two-speed mountain tourism industry. On the one hand, professionals connected or located benefit from the prestige of their destination, while other penalties because independent or located on the periphery of the massif.
This does not allow an equitable redistribution for the development of all the actors of the whole mountain. The DIH CCI des Vosges, together with UL as a Competence Centre, will help ESF in digitalizing the tourism ecosystem for better improve the travel experience of the tourists in this mountain region.

AE Description

The experiment will consist in the creation of a platform that will act as a knowledge facilitator. The data that will feed the platform come from cyber physics systems deployed in mountain environments (companies of different types, forest environments, ski slopes, mountain cities, users of tourist infrastructures).
This data will be linked to a knowledge base that evolves over time and will be the core of the platform. The following figure summarizes the architecture of the technological platform to be developed.
The knowledge base will be linked to a profiling algorithm that will ensure a constant data flow and will be fed by the database itself to refine its profile models. Two other modules are part of the platform: the one connected to professionals and the one connected to tourists, through applications, to improve their travel experience.
The module for professionals sends, using different types of cyber physical systems, reliable data on professionals’ activities to the knowledge base, in exchange for highly relevant situation reports on clients to professionals.
The module for improving the travel experience collects data from tourists, which is sent to the knowledge base, and in return gives services for improving the choice of activities available in the contextualized environment.

Partner & Expertise:

DIH CCI des Vosges/Quai Alpha	Organisation responsible for representing the interests of commercial, industrial and service companies. Quai Alpha is the CCI start-up incubator.
ESF	The French Ski School is the biggest ski school in the world. They represent 17 000 ski instructors over all the French Mountains. They continuously adapt their know-how, products and services to new trends with one focus: the client.
UL	Research Centre for Automatic Control (CRAN) is a joint research unit between the University of Lorraine and the French National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS) – Institute for Information Sciences and Technologies (INS2I) and Institute for Engineering and Systems Sciences (INSIS).

For further information, please visit https://dih4cps.eu/experiment-03/