Yesterday, Tuesday December 9th, the Benidorm City Council unveiled the BeCiti hub at the El Torrejó Municipal Centre. The City Council is behind this cutting-edge centre for smart tourism innovation, which aspires to change the tourism industry via sustainability, technology, and shared knowledge. The mayor of the city, Toni Pérez, the manager of BeCiti, Silvia Blasco, and the councillor for Innovation and European Funds, Aida García Mayor, officially opened the area where this project will take place. The event also had other members of the City Council there, as well as Ciriaco Clemente, the Concessions Manager for Veolia (formerly Hidraqua) in the Valencian Community; Fede Fuster, the president of Hosbec and the Hotel Technology Institute; Salvador Benaigues, the president of ADESTIC (the Cluster of Innovative Companies for Tourism); and other business and social leaders.
Toni Pérez said that the BeCiti hub, or Benidorm Smart Tourism Innovation Centre, started six months ago. He also said that about twenty companies and organisations are already interested in working together. Their agreements will be signed soon, and they will work on projects, studies, and technological solutions that can be tested in the city before being used in other places.
The Mayor has said that this new space will be a “focus for attracting talent and generating ideas that will enable destinations and the tourism sector to be more competitive and more sustainable.” He also said that “we are taking a quantitative and qualitative leap in the work we have been doing since 2015, when we decided that Benidorm needed to recover its tourist reputation and we designed a roadmap that resulted in our certification as the first smart tourist destination in the world and, from there, everything that has come after.”
The Mayor said, “We are continuing on the path of Benidorm Smart Tourism Destination (DTI), with our sights also set on strengthening co-governance and the public-private collaboration that SDG 17 sets for us.” “So that we can remain at the forefront and a benchmark in tourism in terms of digitalisation, sustainability, accessibility, and innovation.” The centre will have a workspace that is open to startups, businesses, institutions, research centres, and the public. It will also be in line with the national Smart Destination Platform (PID) project, which is based in Benidorm and promoted by Segittur. It will also be in line with the Open Innovation Platform (PIA), which is also based in our city and proposed by the same state agency.
The Mayor also said that this project “culminates a dream that we began to materialise almost twenty years ago, which was to convert the old Torrejó town hall into a great centre at the service of tourism.” This new space will house “our central tourist information office and also the facilities of the municipal Tourism department and Visit Benidorm, to which this innovation hub is now added.”
The water problem
The BeCiti project is part of the “Benidorm DTI + Safe” Tourism Sustainability Plan. It was made in collaboration with Bosonit, a technology consulting firm that specialises in Data and Advanced Analytics and is one of the best at putting in place solutions based on generative artificial intelligence.
To reach its goals, it will hire five technicians who are experts in different areas of technology, data, and innovation. These technicians will work with the staff who provide services in the Smart Office and other municipal departments, as well as with partner companies to develop specific technological projects or solutions.
Veolia and Hosbec have worked together on the hub since it opened, and they are now working together to solve the hub’s first problem: improving water management in hotel administration. This would let tourism businesses copy the strategy that has made Benidorm one of the most water-efficient places in the world. Because of this, both Ciriaco Clemente and Fede Fuster have praised the work being done at the innovation hub, calling it “a completely new way of understanding tourism management.”
Author: Derek Appleton
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