The president of the Cluster, Cesáreo Pardal, participated in the fourth edition of the monographic conference organised by the Provincial Council.

The opportunities provided by information and communication technologies (ICT) for the tourism sector will be the subject of analysis and debate at the fourth edition of the TurisTIC conference in Pontevedra, to be held on 2 December at the Castelao Building of the Museum of Pontevedra. The forum is organised by the Pontevedra Provincial Council and its Smartpeme network and participation was both in person and online.

The president of Galicia Tourism Cluster, Cesáreo Pardal, together with the president of the provincial organization, Carmela Silva, and the vice-president of TIC Galicia Cluster, Santiago Paz, took part in the official opening of the conference. After the words of the provincial responsible in which he stressed the importance of the administrations to listen to the sector when making intelligent decisions and the need to invest also in the rural world and to respond to the new demands of users in terms of digitisation, it was the turn of the president of the Galicia Tourism Cluster to speak.

Cesáreo Pardal agreed with the call in favour of the rural tourism sector, explaining that without coverage on mobiles and computers it is difficult to work and compete with other territories at a time like the present in which “unfortunately, it is more important to upload a photo to Instagram than to serve a breakfast made with eggs from the hen in the garden”. He also referred to the consequences that the covid pandemic has had on the sector in general: “We have realised during all this time that digitalisation was an important part of our business. Whoever was not present with a website and on social media was not able to sell. We have gone through a very accelerated process in which the sector has realised that it is necessary to be up to date in terms of software, digitalisation, networks, updating calendars…”.

Pardal also referred to the need to “continue working, collaborating with the public sector because they are the ones who make the decisions, but you (the private sector) are the ones who have to tell them where we want to go”, and made an appeal with a view to 2022: “Everything we sell next year is what we are going to harvest in the coming years. We have to ensure that the people who come to Galicia and Pontevedra receive a service in line with the excellence we have”.

The opening ceremony was followed by the first of the two round tables on the programme, dedicated to “Responsible tourism in the new normality”. The journalist Nani Arenas was in charge of giving the floor to Maite Vence, director of Observer Science Tourism; Beatriz Pérez, executive director of Máis que Románico; Javier Olleros, chef of the restaurant Culler de Pau, and Marta Iglesias, founder of Piragüilla Lecer e Aventura.

The programme also included a presentation by Esther Rodríguez, CEO and co-founder of Mystreetbook, on “Hyperpersonalisation for a smart and sustainable territory” and a second round table on “The role of data in the new tourism ecosystem” with the deputy for New Technologies, Ana Mejías, as moderator and the intervention of Guillem Escrivá, technical analyst responsible for the TRB project at Nethodology; Lorena Rosende, CEO of Itera Técnica, and María José Villanueva, director of digital transformation of the CTIC Foundation.

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