Page - 50 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

1 Introduction: TheDevelopment of the TourismMarket The travelmarket is saturated and has long since developed into a buyer’smarket. Marketing has therefore played an important role for tourism providers since the mid-1970s. At the turn of the millennium, the Internet began to turn the travel industry upside down.Travel portals have influenced travel decisions since the late 1990s. Especially, the launch of lastminute.com in 1998 was one of the defining inventions of online travel. The company still sells last minute package deals at short noticewhich is a great advantage over traditional agents. This was followed by digital content platforms for the display of photos and videos, social networks, digital travel portals, geo-targeting, the virtualisation of reality (VR) and the expansionof reality (AR) (“Tourismuszukunft”, n.d.).Thesedevelopments havean impact not only on travel decisions, but also on travel arrangements during a trip. Digital technologies have changed the entire customer journey.1 But the development does not stop there. Artificial intelligence (AI), decentralised data structures and the associated evolution of customer interaction will transform customer journeys even more extensively. These developments offer numerous opportunities. At the same time, these processes are extremely challenging for the industry. Representatives of the industry are already using digitalisation options, but complain about the lack offinancial resources, the lack of know-how, the lack ofqualityofcontent fromthe individual companiesand the lackofbroadbandwhen implementing digital instruments (Statista 2019). The tourism industry is characterised by small-scale provider structures and a high level of complexity of tourism service packaging (Freyer 2015).Many indi- vidual organisations are involved in the creation of a single tourist product. Packages couldcombine for example transport, accommodations,meals, attractions and entertainment.With the latest digital developments, the provision of tourism service packages becomesmorepersonalised andmultichannel (Keller et al. 2017). Travellers receive a more active role and co-create their travel experience in real timeusingdifferent channels.Given thesedevelopments,DMOsneed to consider a strategic realignment. In order to support digital innovation, they need to become digital platforms to improve the travel experience for their guests. The chapterwill present a case study on howDMOs inGermany currently dealwith developments related to artificial intelligence and decentralised data structures. Further, it will be asked if an open data hackathon is a suitable approach to help ensure the com- petitivenessof tourist destinations.Thesequestionswill beansweredbyanalysinga hackathon case study. Howare thecurrentdevelopmentsaroundartificial intelligenceanddecentralised data structures changing tourism? 1Customer Journey: Customer journey refers to the path followed by a customer via so-called touchpoints beforemaking a purchase decision (Yachin 2018). 52 N. Richter andD. Dragoeva