Paul presented the closing keynote for the Outback Tourism Awards in Western Queensland

The key points were:

  • Digital is the utilisation of data through technology to solve a problem or create new value.
  • The mobile phone has been the greatest disruptive technology in tourism over the last decade.
  • That strategy should not be lead by the technology.
  • That the nature of change in tourism means that you need a plan but must also be ready to seize opportunities as they crop up.
  • That you need to understand your strategic landscape and how things evolve towards utility in order to understand what might happen (H/T @swardley). For example, drones moving towards platforms with ecosystems of developers.
  • That AI will mean changing how we do individual tasks rather than replacing people.
  • That there are huge and exciting opportunities but those opportunities also constitute large threats