Winners of the Tourism Innovation Awards 2020:

The Best Customer Experience Award by Mastercard:

• Iberostar Hotels & Resorts: A new hotel booking experience, innovative, immersive and focused on the user experience, where you can hiper-personalize your room and book it from the 3D hotel map.
• Finalists:
  • NH Hotel Group presents Mobile Guest Service, the digital solution which offers all the services of the hotel in your mobile.
  • Past View offers a touristic guide tour with smartglasses through the most emblematic places of different cities such as Seville, Barcelona, Athens and Efeso.

The Best Innovation on AI and Data Analytics Award by Telefónica:

• ARCTUR: Tourism Impact Model (TIM) is a comprehensive tool for modelling and optimisation of the tourism impact on a local ecosystem through fostering collaboration between different stakeholders in order to reach sustainable development in a specific geographical area by following the UN SDGs.
• Finalists:
  • MyStreetBook is an artificial intelligence system that hyper-personalizes travellers’ plans based on their tastes and that has an associated intelligent management platform for real-time decision-making. The objective is to discover values ​​such as cultural identity, own gastronomy, nature or heritage, distribute the traveller through the territory, diversify-digitize the local offer and promote greater cohesion between the destination, inhabitants and visitors.
  • Hotelmize provides a unique response for this challenging time for the travel industry, using innovative technologies and proprietary algorithms to provide proven profit optimization. We used capital market trading strategies and financial technologies, together with our travel industry experience, to create a big impact on OTAs, Tour Operators, Bed Banks, and Hotel Resellers profit optimization. It’s a unique chance to improve that you won’t find elsewhere in the travel industry.

The Best Digital Campaign Award by City Sightseeing Worldwide:

• Imagine your Korea: Under Covid-19, digital content consumption sharply increased, with many people experiencing depression due to limited travel options. So KTO created brand communications to enhance interest in Korea. Consumers were quick to react to this digitally intensive campaign. Under the theme “Feel the Rhythm of Korea,” KTO created a promotional video with traditional Korean rhythm paired with contemporary dance vibes. It recorded around 270 million views and showed explosive responses.
• Finalists:
  • Barceló Hotel Group: At its core, digital marketing is all about communicating with your customers in their own language on the platforms where they hang out. Barceló Hotel Group has produced a wonderful documentary as part of the Digital Marketing Strategy because its target audience has moved to VOD platforms. Good content marketing should raise awareness, increase traffic and conversion, or boost customer loyalty. Great content marketing can do all four at once.
  • Greater Bogotá Convention Bureau: The GBCB worked on building a strategy whose main objective was to position and promote the MICE industry in Colombia while also showcasing the Convention Bureaux’s work as critical players in the reactivation. And this was how the digital campaign #ChangeTheDateNotTheDestination was born. We wanted to send the unified message that it was essential to commit to an event’s chosen destinations before the crisis.

The Best Sustainable Tourism Project Award by EY:

• Barcelona Turisme: In 2011, Barcelona was the first City in the world to be awarded with the Biosphere certification. The Biosphere BCN standard for Commitment to Sustainable Tourism is awarded to tourism industry committed to responsible and environmentally – friendly management, culture, decent work conditions, gender equity and social and economic benefits. The Commitment is based on the guidelines in the UN 17 SDGs, which are part of the Agenda 2030 and promoted by the World Tourism Association (WTO).
• Finalists:
  • Global Omnium: Valencia is the first city in the world to verify and certify (AENOR) the carbon footprint of all the tourist activity in the city, a challenge that has been achieved within the framework of the agreement established between the Valencia City Council, through the Visit València Foundation, and Global Omnium, through the Aguas de València Foundation, to develop a Sustainable Tourism Strategy for the city of València that passes through the fulfilment of the 17 SDGs of the 2030 Agenda.
  • UP Norway: When the borders to Norway closed and we were unable to continue to welcome international travellers to Norway, we decided to get creative! Together with our tourism provider partners and international sustainability experts, we turned the historic Discovery Route between Stavanger and Bergen into Norway’s most sustainable journey through future-oriented experience design and digital storytelling, all with the bold goal of contributing to make Norway a leading destination for regenerative travel.

The Best New Business Model Award by CaixaBank:

• Our Mapp brings local entrepreneurs, municipalities, nearby regions and greater tourist attractions closer. With our technology, we empower accommodations/DMO’s to provide the best and most up to date city/region information to their guests.
• Finalists:
  • Komodore is the tourist lodgings guest management solution that enables professional property managers to eliminate repetitive tasks, improve the experience and save time on each reservation.
  • ImmuvID is a digital solution to allow people to Live, Work and Travel WITH the pandemic. It is a blockchain-based digital wallet to store and use COVID related test results combined with a tried and tested identity confirmation system that allows Airlines, Hotels, Restaurants, Museums or any building to be 100% sure about the health status of a person/client/tourist.