Good practice:

Transylvania Info Portal

Technology, the key enabler for Industry 4.0 has a tremendous influence on tourism. Transylvania Info Portal is considered a best practice in the context of the INNO INDUSTRY project because the cluster develops a service within the tourism industry that supports digital transformation. In 2018, Romania received only 2.8 million foreign tourists and many of the travel agencies do not have an application created especially for its tourists, and the investments in e-tourism are small. E-tourism describes the digitization of processes and value chains to optimize their efficiency and involves e-information, e-booking (hotels, means of transport, etc.) and e-payment. The information posted on Transylvania Info Portal contains QR codes, GPS coordinates, digital guides and smart phone applications. This is useful both for users due to their specificity (ex. special maps with key points of the respective destination / agenda with useful numbers on the trip, etc.), and for travel agencies for building quality service packages. This portal brings together participants in tourism sector, providers /pensions, hotels, travel agencies etc./ and consumers of goods & services in Romania.The portal promotes the authentic Romanian as a significant part of the experience delivered to tourists, respectively gastronomy, music and dance, traditions and customs. The best practice stakeholders are universities and cluster members. The beneficiaries are travel agency, pensions, hotels and tourists.

The portal is the result of collaboration with cluster members / owners of structures, universities and the press /and is mainly based on volunteering. However, we can estimate the implementation effort at over 50,000 euros given the huge amount of information that had to be processed and digitized.

The activity of the local and National Tourist Information Centres has increased by promoting and locating within the Transylvania Info Portal. Over 50,000 people were informed in 2019.

Selecting, digitizing and optimizing information was the biggest challenge. Also the standardization of descriptions and their acceptance and use by the social partners. An important effort was the publication and promotion of the project portal.

Albac commune / NUTS-RO121 / LAU-2130 / from Alba county Romania, obtained the second place in the EDEN 2019 competition, by using the digital location of the tourist structures with the help of QR codes and became the first SMART tourist resort in the Apuseni Mountains.
This QR coding can be used for all classified tourist structures in Romania, but also the other states in Eurogites where it is not widely used today and is not standardized. The advantage of using QR for digital location is remarkable by using maps already implemented on smartphones.
Likewise, digital localization with the help of QR codes can be used and standardized for the 38 certified European cultural routes of the Council of Europe.