Search Results (5)

The accelerated development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has had an impact on the way tourism is carried out today. The concept of smart cities and smart destinations is gaining momentum, which also requires smart consumers, i.e., informed, communicated, and connected. In this sense, the application of the value chain concept to tourism implies reconsidering the weight of digital technologies in its structure and, therefore, in the decision-making process of current and potential tourists. The study aims to demonstrate the need and convenience of incorporating technology as an innovative factor in the management process of the tourism value chain and its contribution to the positioning of the destination, taking the city of Cuenca (Ecuador) as a case study. The contributions are, firstly, the ICT adoption as an innovation factor in the value chain. In addition, through a survey of foreign tourists, it was verified that ICTs are a trend as a personalized communication channel, which contributes to valuing the integral tourism offer of the territory. Full article

Since the emergence of COVID-19, the interruption of non-core activities negatively affected the entire world economy so that companies in emerging countries had to adapt to the “new reality” by seeking new business alternatives. The objective of this study is to determine the intention of Tamaulipas MSMEs to adopt inbound marketing tools based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), considering the variables of attitudes, trust, and perceived technological risk. The proposed model was analyzed using the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) method. A sample of 310 companies from the state of Tamaulipas was obtained. The results showed that perceived usefulness, trust, attitude, and word of mouth (WOM), were the variables that most influence the intention to adopt inbound marketing tools and, on the contrary, perceived ease and perceived risk were not significant. This demonstrates that adding new variables to the TAM model improves the predictive power of intention with respect to the adoption of new technology, providing a picture of the behavior of companies seeking to continue growing, despite the lags left by the COVID-19 pandemic. Full article

The popular and solidarity economy (EPS) emerges as an alternative approach to poverty aligned with the principles of sustainable development; in this sense, some countries in the region have adopted policies for its growth and development, among them Ecuador. The experience of a rural community was shown; the objective of the study was to identify the factors that hinder the achievement of better efficiency indexes, regarding the implementation of policies at the local level, with respect to rural productive associations. The case of the agricultural productive associations located in the parish of El Valle, Cuenca, Ecuador, was studied. The type of research was mixed: quantitative to support the information extracted from the instruments applied and derive the pertinent analysis and qualitative to collect primary information from the actors involved in the study. We used the action research model through the use of surveys, interviews and focus groups. The key contribution of this work was to making visible and understanding the needs of the rural communities of the sector from their development perspectives, respecting their ancestral knowledge and articulating from the academy the private–public action for the generation of policies for governance, effective application of democracy and promotion of the technical and associative potential of the agroecological productive units. The results show regularities in terms of their socioeconomic situation, their mode of action and the impact caused on their productive dynamics by the atomized decisions of local actors in the exercise of governance. These fail to articulate the implementation of policies at the territorial level to the detriment of their effectiveness and efficiency and, therefore, do not bring about substantial changes in their levels of dependence and dynamics of productive activity—diagnostic components that will be used for the formulation of joint multilevel policies. Full article

The construction of this research was developed to reflect the way information and communication technologies (ICT) have transformed the tourist distribution channel. This phenomenon has caused, in the first place, the direct interaction between tourists and tourism operators and, second, the appearance of real virtual intermediation actors, a situation that disadvantages the activity of traditional travel agencies and causes immersions in reintermediation processes at risk of compromising its permanence in the market. On the other hand, in a sustainable tourism context, this work represents an opportunity for intermediation agencies in terms of a value management practice as they can develop sustainable promotion processes that promote, for example, the protection of the territory, the conservation of resources, and cultural rescue. Therefore, according to travel agencies, to directly influence the distribution chain, we verified this work to demonstrate the use of digital language as a benefit in the design of sustainable tourism products. Thus, from the methodological discipline of discourse analysis, we created sets of words with semantic content that were valued through the sentiment scales of the Facebook social media network. The results showed that digital promotion favors airline companies and hostels more than a sustainable tourism environment as such. Finally, from the study of probability and density equations, predictive models were used to configure linguistic icons in promoting sustainable tourism. Full article