The Role Of Smart Tourists In Shaping The Future Of Air Travel Sector

Nowadays, terms like “innovation“ and “change” became part of the global tourism vocabulary, since both are central to improving business and destination competitiveness and as such, to improving the tourist’s experience. Creating unique and memorable experiences for consumers represents a dominant concept in the tourism industry. In recent years, it has become critical for the tourism providers to find innovative ways to differentiate their services and products and to create memorable and valuable experiences for the tourists. In that context, the impact of technology is remarkable in the air travel sector. The recent research shows the way technology is designing the air travel business. The airlines priorities focus on enhancing the passenger experiences, and they are also very interested in improving business intelligence to better understand their operations and customers. Being an industry that is fast adopting the digital world, the aviation sector is making efforts to involve customers in their innovation processes. In order to improve the experiences, a lot of airports and airlines responded to the large number of passengers carrying smartphones, notebooks, tablets and e-readers by equipping seats with power and USB ports, or are looking at ways to integrate passengers’ own devices with the design of the seat. The paper aims to identify the role of the passenger in the equation of air travel business –passengers – technology. Is he responsible for the change of business in air travel sector? Or, on the contrary,the air travel sector does influence the behaviour and the habits of the customer?