Reimagining Tourism Events: Spain’s Preparation for the Return of a Healthier Breed of Tourists

Abstract

High-tech solutions that mainly emerge in sport, nightlife, musical and cultural tourism events are arising that meet new pockets of demand, try to boost traveller confidence and attempt to foster tourism sustainability. Hence, Spain has become a lab for all these flourishing digital innovations that test the improvement of tourists’ experience. It appears that the best-positioned tourism events that will take advantage of this pandemic will be those that best meet the needs of a new upcoming singular segment named “Generation Clean”. How the event tourism industry attracts tourists by satisfying their new elevated expectations remains to be seen. The use of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) gadgets across QR codes, apps, wearables and bots are consolidating among inbound international and domestic tourists, which is allowing to track in real time visitors’ needs, behaviours and health conditions. Robots, artificial intelligence, facial recognition, among other advancements, are helping the industry confront this new panorama. Based on the preceding discussion, this chapter seeks to shed light on the significance of technological initiatives as a motor that boosts the recovery of the event tourism segment in Spain. The interest of this chapter is motivated by the unquestionable need of technological transformation tourism industry for the post-COVID-19 world.