An IAD type framework for Blockchain enabled smart tourism ecosystem

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Abstract

The concept of smart tourism remains fuzzy when it comes to practice because of the lack of clarity on the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders in addition to complex institutional ecosystem that exist within the tourism industry. Further, trust and safety of the data generated due to the advancement of smart tourism in varied institutional arrangements pose huge challenges. Extant literature proposes that the application of decentralized ledger promises possible solutions to most of these problems due to the inherent features of the Blockchain technology. This suggestion raises two practical questions. First, does the sophisticated additional layer adds complexity to its practical application? Second, will the suggested solutions really lead to a win-win for all the stakeholders involved? In this study, we use Ostrom's action arena to examine the exchanges (information, contractual and monetary) between various stakeholders in a BCT enabled smart tourism of a Blockchain enabled tourism industry to answer these two questions.

Introduction

The tourism industry is evolving towards providing technology enabled smart experiences which is a considerable advancement over the traditional practice of using Internet enabled devices only for bookings and maintaining the guest records. With technological advancements, tourism managers receive large amount of consumer data that helps in improved tourist profiling and customized touristic experiences resulting in better market offerings. Appearance of customer-to-customer business models (e.g., Couchsurfing, Airbnb, BlaBla Cars, Freelancer guides etc.) and more intimate data about the tourists pose, a challenge of data storage and security as the data can be manipulated and misused. Recent tourism literature proposes the integration with Blockchain technology to maintain trust and reputation of tourism companies in this decentralized marketplace (Calvaresi, Leis, Dubovitskaya, Schegg, & Schumacher, 2019), where traditional structural assurance agents (Shapiro, 1987) do not fit well. These assurance agents can be banks for transactions, quality assurance agents like TripAdvisor, risk mitigating insurance agents etc. The online marketplace in general has lot more uncertainty compared to traditional brick-and-mortar stores. Further, the intangible nature of tourism products anyway needs more trust in the vendor/seller than for buying tangible goods.

There is an increasing thrust in the tourism industry to adapt and leverage upon the emerging Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) because of the widespread acceptance of its importance in capture and transfer of data when integrated with smart devices. ‘Smart tourism’ remains an loosely defined concept (Gretzel, Sigala, Xiang, & Koo, 2015) as the literature on smart tourism focuses on many new technologies (e.g., smart sensors, big data, machine learning), new ways of connectivity and exchange of information (e.g., IoT, RFID, and NFC) and psychological mapping in development and delivery of the tourism product but seldom as an interconnection, synchronization and concerted use of different technologies that constitutes smartness' (Höjer & Wangel, 2015). One can understand smart as the use of real-time operational data for ¨ analytics, modeling, visualization and integrating the inferences for real time decisions that create better value for the end user (Harrison et al., 2010). In tourism, this smart offering translates to many stakeholders working simultaneously and synchronously for better utilization of resources and a wow experience for the tourists. If we look at examples of how smart tourism development efforts translate into practice, this incoherence of understanding the various aspects of smart tourism becomes evident for e.g., Chinese and South Korean governments funding technological infrastructure projects (Hwang, Park, & Hunter, 2015); Europe focusing more on smart end-user applications to facilitate information transfer and bookings e.g. Barcelona installing interactive bus shelters that provide not just bus information but also touristic information and Amsterdam placing interactive beacons that help tourists with language translations and crowd management based on real-time data (Gretzel et al., 2015).

Despite, these advantages, the smart tourism ecosystem has issues like data privacy, safety, and management. Blockchain technology that is based on Merkel tree algorithm and is a decentralized ledger, offers ready solutions to the above-mentioned issues. In addition, it provides the advantages of increased efficiency, transparency and certainty (Ibid). However, the integration of smart tourism with Blockchain may pose its own issues. The first question that it raises is whether the additional layer of sophisticated technology adds complexity to its practical application? The question that is even more pertinent is whether this integration will indeed lead to a win-win for all the stakeholders involved.

We build upon the published used cases and articles to put the possible interactions that would result from the integration of blockchain technology in tourism in an IAD framework type action arena (Ostrom, 2005, Ostrom, 2011). We discuss the theoretical background in section 2. Doing so helps us examine the relative positions, benefits and possible losses to the involved agents and institutions as IAD has been used to break down and analyze parts of the whole and the resultant interactions. We elaborate on these inter-relationships in section 3. In section 4, we summarize and conclude our discussion. This work examines the use of Blockchain in tourism in practical light. Further, it proposes the use of Ostrom's action arena as a canvas for ranking interactions and resultant well-being.1

Section snippets

Blockchain enabled smart tourism

Smart tourism is defined as “tourism supported by integrated efforts at a destination to collect, aggregate and analyzed [emphasis added] data derived from physical infrastructure, social connections, government/organizational sources and human actors [emphasis added] in combination with the use of advanced technologies to transform that data into on-site experiences and business value-propositions with a clear focus on efficiency, sustainability and experience enrichment” (Gretzel et al., 2015

Action arena of Blockchain ecosystem in smart tourism

Participants: In the IAD framework, the number of individuals, teams or composite actors, their attributes in terms of their age, sex, education, experience (knowledge and skill) is important as they are the decision-making entities. The resources and entitlements of the participants decides their relative positions, and predicts their possible set of actions and strategies. The authorized actions are influenced by the participant in the hope to affect some outcome variable(s). Their choices

Contributions and future research

Smart technologies are rapidly transforming the field of tourism (Gretzel et al., 2015). They not only present many opportunities but also challenges. With ever increasing reliance of countries on tourism sector's contributing to GDP as well as an urgent need to upscale tourist experience, wellbeing and stakeholder value, smart tourism seems to be a way forward. A major concern in felicity of the stakeholders is data privacy and security in the context of smart tourism (Gretzel et al., 2015).

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Janardan Krishna Yadav: Conceptualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Deepika Chandra Verma: Data curation, Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft. Srinivas Jangirala: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Shashi Kant Srivastava: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing.

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