Benidorm adds technical staff to advance the development of the DTI Platform

Benidorm City Council has hired new technical staff to advance the development of the Benidorm Smart and Sustainable Tourist Destination project. This technical management office is tasked with supporting the City Council in the daily management and maintenance of its DTI Platform. This technical office includes all the services necessary to maintain the platform's various components, such as beach management, bathing water quality, parking, wastewater management, weather stations, environmental monitoring, and more. This will make it "a powerful management tool for monitoring the city's status in real time and for obtaining indicators and measures to support decision-making and improve the management of our destination, both at the tourism and local levels," stated Mayor Toni Pérez. The mayor welcomed the technicians who will be in charge of developing this project, along with Aida García Mayor, Councilor for Finance, Contracting, European Funds, Innovation, and Quality, to the municipal Smart Office and encouraged them to "work hard to continue positioning Benidorm as a benchmark within the Smart Tourist Destinations network, allowing us to continue offering high-value-added services to both citizens and tourists who visit the city each year."

The new project team consists of a project manager, three IT analysts, and a technology facilitator who will support the Thinking City Platform (DTI) developed by Telefónica, the company awarded the project for two years, extendable for another two. This tool will provide access to all the information extracted from terminals installed throughout the municipality in a single repository, offering real-time updates on the status of all internal services and those provided to citizens and tourists.

The data obtained through the platform is expected to serve as a knowledge base to support decision-making by municipal authorities, make more intensive use of available IT infrastructure, and increase information security. Among the services expected to have a significant impact are the beach web portal, a satisfaction survey tool, a mobile app with tourist information, water and beach consumption monitoring, waste control, environmental sensors, and smart parking, among others.

Benidorm is the first municipality to have obtained the certifications that ensure compliance with the requirements and processes regulating it as a smart tourism destination, specifically at the national level through the Segittur entity and at the regional level through Turisme Comunitat Valenciana. It was also the first municipality in the world to be certified as a Smart Tourism Destination according to the UNE 178501 standard.

The mayor emphasised that, in the immediate future, this platform is expected to be integrated with the Smart Destination Platform being developed by the State, exchanging data based on its relevance to tourism management. He also noted that this platform "is also based in Benidorm, which further reinforces all the municipal work to become a benchmark in tourism intelligence and the application of new technologies to improve destination management."