Internet of Things: Designing Digital Eco-Systems for Competitive Tourism Related Micro and Small Enterprises in Pakistan

The evolving technological advancements and the advent of the fourth industrial revolution through the influx of the Internet of Things (IoT), has bewildered the business world. The new technologies have brought world markets closer, evading the global geographical borders. In the service sector, the tourism industry, has an immense prospect to further foster through the advanced technological tools such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) integrated with tourism offerings may bring forth enhanced tourism experiences essentially in the arena of authentic heritage tourism in Asia. The times when tourists intend to have wider access to knowledge about the destinations, modern developments in Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence can play a pivotal role in establishing destination knowledge sharing and tourist’s information collection protocol. This chapter thus underlines the core areas of integration between information technology and the heritage tourism industry. The contents predominantly emphasize the prominence of the heritage tourism destinations and answers some pressing questions which relate to the need of integration of digitization in heritage destinations and why this combination is perceived to be inevitable. This chapter thus considerably underscores the fusion of technology with the heritage tourism offerings in Asia and how they will emerge as future competitive tourism destinations.