URBAN HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT AND THE ACCEPTANCE OF ICT IN THE TOURIST EXPERIENCE: A study on the perception of managers and visitors to destinations in Northeast Brazil.
ICTs; Tourism; Urban Hospitality; Governance; Smart Tourist Destinations.
Although tourism activity has been growing at a rapid pace since the Second World War, different factors of various magnitudes have influenced the way in which it is conceived, planned and managed in localities. The increase and improvement of access and use of Information and Communication Technologies by people have meant that the offer of products and services in a locality has to be prepared to welcome this new consumer profile, through a more thoughtful and thoughtful hospitality. structured to improve the visitor experience. Corroborating this, Buhalis and Amaranggana (2015), already stated that ICTs contribute in terms of generating experiences for tourists, improve efficiency in the automation of processes for related organizations and even open a new scenario for destination management (Ivars- Baidal et al., 2019). Therefore, some cities have undergone transformations related to new technologies and various other aspects, thus emerging concepts such as Smart Cities, Responsive Cities and also Smart Tourist Destinations. It is believed that localities can use new technologies to generate better and greater hospitality, thus providing a positive experience for tourists who seek it. Based on this, the objective of this study is to analyze the use of ICTs in the management of urban hospitality and in the tourist experience, both by managers and by visitors to tourist destinations in Northeast Brazil. In order to achieve the proposed objectives, with regard to questions of methodological contribution, this research will be a multiple case study, of an exploratory and descriptive nature. And so, it will be carried out with the main representatives of the municipal tourism departments and with tourists who have visited the destinations, and then the data will be collected, respectively, through semi- structured interviews, online questionnaires and the realization of a focus group, also online. From there, data processing will be done quantitatively and qualitatively and to support the content analysis of the data that will be triangulated, Excel and Iramuteq software (version 0.7 Alpha 2) will be used. It is hoped that this work can contribute to the tourist activity of the localities by collecting data that can demonstrate the profile of visitors to these destinations, what their experiences were like and what are their expectations regarding the use of ICTs in the local and tourist infrastructure, thus providing important informational resources so that local governments can use them strategically to improve the competitiveness of their tourist destinations.