Smart Tirana

Abstract

Albania represents an interesting case of a newly emerging destination in the international tourist market, with intensive pressures coming from seasonal visit flows and the related impacts on the environment. The Albanian Culture Marketing Strategy, while correctly focusing on heritage for the de-seasoning of visits in congested areas and for awareness-raising about the country's cultural identity among tourists and residents, presents some limitations in the definition of application patterns and concrete solutions. In particular, the active contribution of potential users, of ICTs and, in particular, the potentialities of widespread tools such as mobile apps seem to be overlooked. In this article, the current scenario of the Albanian tourism sector, with particular emphasis on the cultural segment, is presented through a detailed analysis of relevant program documents in order to outline strengths and weaknesses of the underlying approach. Then, the potential contribution of mobile apps to the sustainable development of destinations are analyzed and the market of available technologies is presented through a taxonomy of a consistent number of representative cases. Finally, the SOS-Tirana app is presented and its adequateness to the context is discussed.

ICT and the Sustainability of World Heritage Sites. Analysis of Senior Citizens’ Use of Tourism Apps

“…Apps can be an essential tool in the development of smart tourism [20]. To this end, it is crucial for all the agents involved: tourists, community, managers, etc.…”

“…The design of the coding sheet is based on the literature review [5][6][7]20,51,66] and the conclusions drawn from the analysis of the group's expectations in relation to tourism apps. It is a questionnaire structured in several sections such as ease to locate and download, characteristics, form of use, and functions (the full coding sheet is located in Appendix A Table A1).…”

“…In the tourist sector, the key is the experience resulting from all the travel stages: pre-travel (search of information, planning, decision-making), on-travel (experiences resulting from the use and consumption of the product or service, and the relationships established with the host community) and post-travel [9,13,[17][18][19]. In addition, the value of experience has acquired more importance with the arrival of the model 2.0 [19,20] and its potential to multiply the reach of the traditional word of mouth [13,21] and the electronic word of mouth (eWOM), when focused in the digital field [22,23].Having highlighted the importance of RICT in the tourism sector, including the cultural one, there are questions about the uses of RICT among different types of tourists, both real and potential, and, consequently, about the differences between digital immigrants and digital natives [24]. Both segments of the population constitute interesting groups for cultural destination marketing organizations [25][26][27] with different expectations and use of RICT [3,28,29].…”

“…Sustainability allows destinations to develop a differentiating and singular positioning in an extremely competitive context [14,18]. In such context, RICT are particularly relevant due to their great potential to improve the experiences of tourists Sustainability 2019, 11, 3203 3 of 17 in a sustainable way [47-49] a for the development of smart tourism [20]. This point highlights the importance and relevance of this study of the use of RICT, specifically tourism apps, by one of the main segments of cultural tourists: Boomers and the Silent Generation.…”

“…In the tourist sector, the key is the experience resulting from all the travel stages: pre-travel (search of information, planning, decision-making), on-travel (experiences resulting from the use and consumption of the product or service, and the relationships established with the host community) and post-travel [9,13,[17][18][19]. In addition, the value of experience has acquired more importance with the arrival of the model 2.0 [19,20] and its potential to multiply the reach of the traditional word of mouth [13,21] and the electronic word of mouth (eWOM), when focused in the digital field [22,23].…”