Data Analytics supporting decision making in the Tourism Sector

Tourism represents an important industry for many areas in the world contributing significantly to Gross Domestic Product. Yet, it is also quite volatile having to cope with changes in demand and tourist behavior, new emerging markets and socio-economic crises. Improving the innovation capability of the tourist sector is a path towards empowering the industry and making it less susceptible to change. This paper presents a Tourism Innovation Decision Support System that is based on the utilization of tourism destination datasets in order to perform their benchmarking and offer recommendations and guidelines towards enhancing their innovation capacity. This system has been pilot tested in a number of tourist destinations in the Adriatic Ionian area.