Merve Orakci (p), Hilal Erkus

Matteo Beghelli

By the recent influence of Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0), robotisation, digitization and automation have come to the discussion and this affects and transforms not only production processes, but also services or financial markets and thus urban space. Technological change affects all sectors , in our case this change influences the tourism sector by creating new trends. The recent trend in organizing travels and tours through online platforms have changed the way of travel planning and influenced new trends such as adventure-themed trips, travels for women, sustainable tourism, gastronomy-oriented trips.
Due to the recent increase in digital trends in the tourism sector, the expectations of tourists are also changing. Traditional advertising and marketing tools, which are frequently used by tourism companies, have become highly digitalized due to the increasing use of smart phones, internet and social media, and digital marketing techniques have become indispensable in customer relations.
Digital tourism platforms are changing the value chain of the tourism industry. Platforms such as Uber and Airbnb, which use location-based applications where real spaces are digitized by automation systems have changed the way of experiencing the urban environment. Antalya, which has a very high tourism capacity is affected by the developments in technology and is experiencing changes that will affect the current tourism presentation such as airbnb, virtual museums, etc. It is still not yet known to what extent tourism in the city will be affected by technological changes and smart tourism forms, and how it will affect the form of tourism production. Focusing on this question, this study discusses possible future scenarios by meeting with sector representatives, local government and tourism NGO representatives in order to investigate how smart applications and technological transformations can transform the production of tourism in Antalya and how these changes influence the spatial transformation in Antalya city.

Michele Bettin (p)

Merve Orakci

Currently, overtourism represents one of the biggest challenges for the future of sustainable tourism in those geographic areas that, mainly due to their small size and high seasonality rate, exceed the thresholds defined by carrying capacity limit (CCL). While tourism supports the improvement of certain social and economic conditions, the increase in tourist flows in over-visited destinations has contributed to the exacerbation of effects such as depopulation of historic centers, weakening of community cohesion, changing traditions, pollution, congestion, and difficulty in preserving local identity and its heritage. New technologies, leveraging the processes of socialization and sharing, partly contribute to these processes, while the very introduction of smart technologies can instead support the prevention and management of the over-tourism phenomenon.
Studies on tourism carrying capacity (TCC) lie in the middle between the need to understand tourism pressure phenomena and to implement tourism management, especially through digital tools that support public policy decision-making and mainstreaming processes. Therefore, a data-oriented approach is implied to act quickly in predicting and preventing overcrowding.
The three case studies presented share a common criticality that directly and indirectly affects the destination system. They are therefore analyzed in their systemic reality through a carrying-capacity scenario simulator, which is useful for interpreting future scenarios relative to a predetermined set of indicators. The methodology follows a study edited by Costa and Canestrelli in 1991, which was implemented and translated into a web tool used and presented during the Interreg Med Alter Eco Plus Project. The analysis was conducted with data and survey responses collected in 2020 and provided by destination-partners. The identification of tourism subsystems, classification of users and level of use was required; then, the analysis aimed at maximizing the destination's revenue through understanding the daily expenditure for each profile was carried out. Finally, the result of the tourism carrying capacity was compared with real tourism flows in the destination.
The results are intended to highlight the different degree of critical relation that exists in the internal system of the three destinations when even one subsystem is at the limit of its capacity and how, in this regard, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) can offer viable resolutive possibilities.

Bernardina Algieri (p), Arturo Leccadito, Rosetta Lombardo (p)

Michele Bettin

Tourism is an engine of socioeconomic progress and cultural development. The sector contributes significantly to the world GDP, creates job opportunities, drives exports, and generates prosperity across regions (WTTC, 2023). Currently, the tourism sector is undergoing many changes, especially due to the development of information and communication technologies and the expansion of collaborative economies, which give the possibility to provide tourist services in a different form. Indeed, tourists are nowadays more open to self-guided holidays and look more at information coming from other tourists (friends, family and anonymous tourists who post reviews on the internet) than in the past. Many tourists use digital technologies and social media to plan, purchase or review travel experiences.
One of the changes in tourism is the creation of short-term rental platforms (Juric, Lindenmeier & Arnold, 2020). Digital technologies have made all destinations compete with one another in the global market. Digitalisation is making the tourism sector face a new stage of development such as smart destinations, smart cities, smart airports, smart seaports, smart hotels and other industries that adopt digital transformation (Buhalis, and Amarangga, 2013; Buonincontri and Micera, 2016).
Although short-term home rentals have attracted a number of scholars, the scientific knowledge about the phenomenon is scattered (Żemła et al. 2021). The majority of existing studies in the tourism literature, mainly qualitative, are focused on examining shared accommodation with the likes of Airbnb and Couchsurfing (Prayag and Ozanne, 2018).
Starting from this context, the aim of the study is twofold: i) to analyse the dynamics of tourist arrivals at short-stay accommodations located in Mediterranean countries using four major international platforms Airbnb, Booking, Expedia, Tripadvisor, and ii) to shed some light on the relationship between the development of platform tourism and economic, climatic, infrastructural, environmental and cultural factors.
To this end, we will adopt a panel framework within a gravity model setting and distinguish among destination Mediterranean countries (Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, France, Malta and Cyprus) and a rich set of origin countries using online platforms. We will consider data from EUROSTAT and the national statistics for our analysis.

Matteo Begheli (p)

Bernardina Algieri

The purpose of this work is, firstly, to provide a determination of the magnitude of the tourism sharing economy phenomenon and its various components for an Italian tourism destination. The second goal is to evaluate the relationship between the tourist sharing economy (or sharing hospitality) and the hospitality managed professionally in terms of direct / indirect competition. Furthermore, the analysis of the turnover associated with different types of accommodations that can be booked on portals will lead to the evaluation of the percentage of "core sharing" in the business of the portals and to an esteem of new tourist flows generated by these tools. The updating of these issues was framed in the situation experienced by the tourism sector following the outbreak of the CoVid-19 and the second year of pandemic. The work therefore also questions the - contrasting - effects of the CoVid-19 on sharing hospitality. An in-depth analysis was carried out on Airbnb which, although not the only active portal in the area analyzed, is generally considered to be the one capable of developing the greatest traffic for the tourist facilities present therein. The analysis shows that, typically, only 20% of the turnover recorded by Airbnb in the metropolitan area of Bologna can be associated with the "pure" sharing economy, while the remaining 80% has different degrees of professional management which, in many cases, undermine the peer-to-peer relationship of the transaction established between the parties involved. Of this 80% of turnover, while 44% is associated with facilities that can be considered in direct competition with hotels, 36% is made up of tourist accommodations which, to varying degrees, play an indirect competition with hotels, thus activating new tourist flows to the destination's area. While this abstract is being presented, the analysis is being updated and expanded using the most recent data. The work also investigates the various consequences of the spread of tourist sharing in urban and extra-urban areas, highlighting the risk of displacement of habitual inhabitants from the most touristic parts of the cities and the permanent destination of the latter at the service of mass tourism, resulting in adverse social reactions.
In the moment this abstract is presented, a complete revisiting of the work is undergoing to integrate new data-set.