The Digital Economy Promotion Agency (Depa) is working with tourism authorities and other partners to forge ahead with a smart tourism drive by capitalising on big data to transform the industry.
The Government Big Data Institute under Depa yesterday entered into a memorandum of understanding agreement with the Thai Meteorological Department to support the development of tourism data intelligence sandbox, which has been initiated in Phuket as a pilot province that leverages big data for better tourism management.
The data intelligence sandbox is being developed from the existing website www.travellink.go.th, which provides a data catalogue related to all tourism information, which allows various parties to make use of it to ensure better management strategies, level up competitiveness and better serve customers.
Digital Economy and Society Minister Chaiwut Thanakamanusorn said tourism is a growth engine for the economy, especially in the post-Covid situation.
The government aims to turn the tourism sector into a smart tourism industry, driven by technology and innovation, in line with the Thailand 4.0 policy, said Mr Chaiwut.
In 2019, nearly 40 million foreigners visited Thailand, but their travel patterns and behaviours have not been used for data analysis, he said.
He was speaking yesterday at the launch of the "Thailand Travelution 2022" event that will support the use of technology to drive tourism development.
The event is scheduled for Nov 18-19 at CentralWorld under the cooperation of Depa, Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) and Phuket Tourist Association.
Depa president and chief executive Nuttapon Nimmanphatcharin said Thailand Travelution 2022 will come with three core parts.
The first involves a hackathon that will find talents that come up with ideas to address challenges in the tourism industry by making use of data collected from the tourism data intelligence sandbox.
The second pertains to seminars by tourism industry experts, including those from airlines, insurance, hotels, payment platforms, as well as 30 tech startups around the region.
The third concerns a travel tech exhibition with more than 100 travel tech product and service developers, including hardware, technology, the metaverse, artificial intelligence and big data applications.
"The smart tourism industry driven by data analytics will support a predictive model that can help those involved to design proper solutions in their fields based on related data categories," said Mr Nuttapon.
Thailand Travelution 2022 is expected to be developed into Asean Travelution in 2026.
