The City Council's proposal is one of 48 that have passed the cutoff for selection across Spain and includes more than 20 actions linked to the deployment of its technological platform
The 'Benidorm DTI Integrates with the PID' project convinces the Secretary of State and obtains 3.1 million European funds for its development
It proposes alliances with other destinations to share solutions and maximize the reach of the investment.
The "Benidorm DTI Integrates with the PID" project, which aims to qualitatively change the technological platform currently being implemented, has convinced the State Secretariat for Tourism, which has decided to grant the city €3,131,094 for its development. This is evident from the final resolution proposal for the call for aid for the deployment of technological platforms, signed yesterday and announced today by the mayor, Toni Pérez.
According to this resolution, Benidorm's proposal is one of 48 that have passed the national cutoff. Of these, 29 correspond to projects submitted by city councils or regional organizations; 14 are proposals from provincial councils or island councils; and the remaining three are from regional administrations.
Toni Pérez emphasized that "Benidorm is the only municipality in the province of Alicante that has been selected for this call for grants," financed 100% with European funds. This means that "we will not have to resort to municipal funds to implement the more than 20 planned initiatives."
The mayor explained that "this project is linked to our Smart Tourism Destination Platform, which is in full development through the Red.es program, and for which we have already tested some pilot projects." Specifically, it proposes advanced solutions to make the most of the data and indicators that we already measure or that we will measure once the implementation of our platform is complete."
Among the solutions included in the project are the creation of a destination portal, a location intelligence module, a loyalty system and module, a smart parking module, and capacity control and flow measurement, not to mention Blue Tourism. Likewise, "it will allow Generative Artificial Intelligence to be used to exploit the information and indicators obtained to improve city management."
Toni Pérez emphasized that "obviously, the new municipal platform will be linked to the Ministry's Intelligent Destination Platform (IDP), also based in Benidorm." This connection between the two platforms will enable "data exchange," so that "we will have access to external indicators that are essential to understanding the reality of the tourism market at all times and adopting future measures; while we will provide data collected by our platform that is of national interest."
As the mayor recalled, "precisely the synergies and collaboration between destinations, which Benidorm has always sought to practice, were key to the philosophy and conception of this call." Hence, within the "Benidorm DTI integrates with the IDP" project, alliances were forged with other municipalities and administrations to share technological solutions and maximize the scope of the investment.
Among the formalized collaborations are those reached with two cities in the Alliance of Sun and Beach Tourism Municipalities (AMT): Torremolinos and San Bartolomé de Tirajana. These synergies will be linked to beach monitoring and the location intelligence module. In addition, alliances have also been forged with the city councils of Elche and Almuñécar and with the Alicante Provincial Council, which has also obtained funding in this call for proposals with its "Smart Costa Blanca 2.0" project.
Toni Pérez emphasized that "the result of this call for proposals is a testament to a job well done and to all the progress we have made since the fall of 2015, when we established a city and destination strategy that over the last 10 years has allowed us to obtain, in competitive competition with other municipalities and administrations, significant financial resources from Europe for the implementation of numerous projects."
"We are at the forefront of tourism intelligence and innovation, and we will be even more so when we complete the development of this new project," he concluded.
Around 200 projects are on the waiting list, have been rejected, or have withdrawn from this call for aid, according to the resolution from the Secretary of State.