Policy Recommendations for Promoting Touristic Attractivity from Local Government Perspective in Innovative Environments

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic situation has had unprecedented negative consequences in the tourism sector, especially in the hotel industry, which has implied negative shocks directly and indirectly in city revenues, employment and economy. Recent research has indicated that technology is becoming central in finding solutions for tourism recovery through the development of new or improved ICT-enabled tourism services, which could help to achieving a higher attraction of tourists and other sources of foreign investments to cities. This paper therefore seeks to analyse the impact of blockchain technologies (BCT) on the tourism business for attracting new customers to cities with the aim at gaining insights regarding public policies to be taken by local governments for improving tourism business in their city. To achieve this aim, this paper provides an empirical research on the impact of BCT on both lowering prices and improving service quality of lodging accommodations by a sample of lodging accommodations in different Italian cities, providing insights to know if the implementation of BCT on hospitality business, can help city governments to improve smart living into the urban space, deriving some recommendations for city government to take public policies to favour the implementation of these technologies into the hospitality industry.