Convergence of IOT in Tourism Industry: A Pragmatic Analysis
Authors: Verma Amit , Shukla Vinod Kumar , Sharma Robin 
Published: January 2021

The term IoT commonly used abbreviation of ‘Internet of Things’ is trending and ascertaining the possible disruption in the tourism and hospitality industry. The industry is a complex interaction of several stakeholders and ancillaries working together for the experience of the tourist. It includes host government, local population, attractions, transportation, accommodation, food, and Beverages etc. tightly embodying the local trade, art, craft, festivals, religion, culture and many more. The tourist is the end consumer seeking experience and justifying with his Imagescape. The Imagescape could be different for the same destination in different people’s mind. The destination management companies work in order to continue, refine, or modify the current destination image to increase the tourist flow. With the IoT, Big Data, blockchain technologies, the destination will become a closely monitored space for the behavior of tourists, shopping patterns, visitation to each attraction, time spend and monetarily benefits generated. The reports will lead to well-calculated decision making for destination management and development of tourism and ultimately impacting the GDP growth. The Tourism industry has always been witnessing the changes and has been upgrading its attire accordingly. There was a time when internet overwhelmed the industry with multiple upgradations and now the Internet of things is going to influence the industry and tourist vividly.

Tourism has been changing with the shifting technologies for several years and has shown multiple advancements to its operations and processes. Another technological trend of IoT is converting Tourism to the Smart Tourism and IoT is the core technology to transform the tourism industry with the help of cloud computing, mobile communication, blockchain, big data and artificial intelligence aligned to enhance the tourist experience. The hospitality industry is counted mainly on the utmost service standards and their executions with intangible characteristics. In such a complex industry, the innovative technology IoT has begun its influence to seek the customer’s satisfaction, cost saving, and business profit. Apart from the personalized rooms, predictive repair and maintenance the IoT will be enhancing the guest experience as well through the Electronic Key Cards which is sent by the hotel on your mobile phone to access the room directly without wasting their precious time in the reception of hotel. The hotel may also charge the guest as per the removal of beers cans from the mini bar of the room without the additional run through of a staff.

The paper is crafted to identify the impacts of IoT on the tourism industry and proposes the model to streamline the industry with tourist’s movement in order to analyze the tourist’s experience completely. The Tourism industry is widespread and includes several stakeholders in overall channel of the tourist circuit. The industry is full of diversities and experiences in diversities. The trending technology may act as a thread to sew all in one comprising the experience and solve the issues of accurate data collection in the tourism industry. Fourth revolution technologies all together making an impact on the working of any domain, and hospitality and tourism industry is one of the front runners in implementing these technologies. The IoT has already started its impact all around the industry and tourism industry is thriving to match the pace to be smartly connected with its guests all the time in hotels transportation or attraction. The technology is still in the early stages of growth and implementation. The paper is divided into three sections of introduction, discussion on influence of Internet of Things technology in different fragments of tourism industry and the impacts of IoT concluded with a proposed model. The model presented in this paper analyzes the impacts of FIR technologies in particular of IOT in tourism domain.