Digitalization of a Tourist Destination

Today digitalization is no longer an innovative process but a necessity, since it enhances interconnection among subjects using digital technologies; it is involved in all the economy branches, including the tourism industry. One of the most important study objects in tourism is a tourist destination. Its digitalization needs to be interconnected with digitalization of tourism on all the levels of economy. Tourist destination digitalization can be viewed from the perspectives of both a process and a systematic approach. However, they do not deny but complement each other. The article reveals the tools using which an increase in the level of digitalization of the territory is achieved. The following 10 types of instruments were highlighted: digital marketing, cloud technologies, information support, Internet of things, virtual tourism, smart territory, navigation satellite systems and geographic information systems, electronic document management, artificial intelligence, big data, as well as some distributed registry utilities. Their application in the complex will increase the income of the territory, optimize tourist flows, and allow to effectively make management decisions. We have developed a rank scale of digitalization and an index of digitalization of the tourist destination as methods for assessing the level of digitalization. The rank scale is applied when considering a digital destination according to the process approach; its values depend on the number of digital tools used by the tourist destination in the digitalization process. We need to remark that in order to achieve the minimum level of digitalization, a destination has to have its own Internet website and use one or two of the digitalization tools described, and to achieve the maximum level---from nine to ten tools. The tourism destination digitalization index is used when considering digitalization as a system. It is based on an assessment of the effectiveness of digitalization and represents the ratio of the gross tourist product of a destination and the cost of implementing digital tools. Different levels of use and a set of digital tools characterize tourist destinations; however, they should all strive to improve their level of digitalization.