Digital Destination Evolution System (DESy)

DESy (short for Digital Destination Evolution System) is an Interreg project between the border areas of Switzerland and Italy and has been created to collect and analyze tourist information using AI. This will benefit the tourism experience of the visitor to both regions. The project started in April 2019 and was completed in February 2023. It is based on the scientific collaboration between the following Swiss partners – Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Scuola Universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana (SUPSI), Agenzia Turistica Ticinese (Ticino’s Cantonal DMO) – and Italian parterns – Distretto dei Laghi, Provincia Verbano-Cusio-Ossola and ATL Novara.

Key achievements of DESy include the implementation of a market-leading marketing automation platform and the integration of an advanced hospitality benchmarking system, HBenchmark, which provides real-time performance indicators for over 50 hotels across the region.

You will find the official website of the project here.

Recent Publications

• Garbani-Nerini, E., Marchiori, E., Cantoni, L. (2022). Destinations and Data State-of-the-Art in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. In: Stienmetz, J.L., Ferrer-Rosell, B., Massimo, D. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2022. ENTER 2022. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94751-4_18
• Garbani-Nerini, E., Marchiori, E., Reale, R., Cantoni, L. (2022). Understanding Preferences in Tourism Email Marketing. In: Stienmetz, J.L., Ferrer-Rosell, B., Massimo, D. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2022. ENTER 2022. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94751-4_34
• Video “Un turismo intelligente per la destinazione Ticino”, a video with Prof. Lorenzo Cantoni, Elide Garbani-Nerini – USI and Luca Preto, Puya Jazayeri – Ticino Turismo, on the project and the topic of Smart Tourism, in Italian: https://www.litorale.usi.ch/it/feeds/8994
• Garbani-Nerini, E., Marchiori, E., Sabatini, N., & Cantoni, L. (2024). Creating private and public value in data-related management projects: a cross-border case study from Switzerland and Italy. In: Liao, H.C., Duenas Cid, D., Macadar, M.A., & Bernardini, F. (eds) Proceedings of the 25th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 269-277. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3657054.3657275

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