Data-Driven Innovation for Tourism: 5 challenges for the Edinburgh City Region

To be a tourist is to choose the unknown over the familiar. The tourist steps outside their workaday life and embraces something totally different. This process of de-familiarising might seem frivolous, ‘extra’, an added bonus, the icing on the cake. On the contrary; it has the power to shape every aspect of a person’s everyday life. In the same way, tourism is not the ‘icing on the cake’ sector. The tourism sector is integral to both the Scottish economy and our country’s reputation on the global stage. Bringing these two insights to bear on the potential of data science throws up some really exciting opportunities for the sector. What if we approach data with the excitement of a tourist? How can embracing the unknown, the serendipitous, the surprising, help us move beyond the now well-trodden paths of narrow recommendation systems? What if we stopped thinking of tourism data as peripheral, and placed it at the heart of a regional growth framework? <a href="https://medium.com/@JoshuaRyanSaha/data-driven-innovation-for-tourism-5-challenges-for-the-edinburgh-city-region-1fc372c1cc23">Read More</a>