Metaverse, Big Data, Biometric Technology and Sustainable Solutions through the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) in the Global South

ENTER conference traditionally offers a range of topics to reflect the current trends in eTourism. In addition to these key topics, the members of the e-Tourism community often volunteered to collaborate with the ENTER23 conference chairs to organise special sessions for the Conference. A special session can be a “mini-conference” on a focused topic, proposed in order to reflect the cutting-edge or context-specific topics.

In the recent years Tourism has been affected by several innovations of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Over the past few years, online tools have transformed the travel and tourism industry. Big Data helps in analyzing traveller trends by collecting information from different consumer centres and developing a specific marketing strategy for the target audience. Biometric technologies revolutionise the potential to better understand culture (i.e., inclusivity) to develop better marketing tools for economic, environmental, and social sustainability. The Metaverse promises to blur the boundaries between the real world and virtual world, and that can be applied to various scenarios, bringing multiple possibilities and applications into the industries that many of them have started trying to embrace the Metaverse. The 4th Industrial Revolution will provide better efficiency for tourism and hospitality operations with possibilities for new products that blur the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres. However, the transformation may also significantly impact host-guest relations, local communities, and their livelihoods. It is, therefore, crucial to find ways to integrate some critical trends in future tourism i.e. the need for sustainability in tourism development and mobilities, digitalization, and enabling technologies, both locally and on the local scale.

ENTER is delighted to collaborate with the researchers from Nankai University (China), University of Surrey (UK), Catholic University (Taiwan), University of Oulu (Finland) and University of Johannesburg (South Africa) to propose four additional topics for ENTER papers and presentations. These topics include:

  • Big data analytics & forecasting in the tourism market
  • Biometric technology: An alternative research method to triangulate inclusive tourism marketing research insights
  • Metaverse in Hospitality
  • Sustainable solutions for Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) in tourism and hospitality sectors in the Global South

The contributions from the special sessions will be presented and published together with the contributions of the main call. More information about the special sessions is available here: https://enter-conference.org/call-for-contributions/