Emphasizing the Digital Shift of Hospitality Towards Hyper-Personalization: Application of Machine Learning Clustering Algorithms to Analyze Travelers

Rethinking Hospitality For Tomorrow

Previous research has shown that small tourism and hospitality businesses have been particularly affected by the pandemic, being pushed for mass lay-offs, temporarily closing, becoming more financially fragile with cash on hand of only one month, and/or seeking support from the government, with problematic difficulties in recovering business (Bartik et al., 2020; Sobaih et al., 2021). Considering that small and medium enterprises constitute 95.4% of the Portuguese entrepreneurial tissue (European Commission, 2019) and that 59.5% of the hospitality is composed of independent hotels (Deloitte, 2020), protecting and securing jobs in Small Hospitality Businesses (SHBs) seems to be of utmost importance for the socio-economic response to COVID-19 in Portugal.

Indeed, micro, small and medium-sized tourist companies are decapitalized financially and in human resources, with no capacity of investment to turn around their businesses on a standalone basis (Gössling et al., 2021). These companies have been facing other challenges for years, like low managerial skills, low technical and, digital skills, which will be exacerbated by the post-pandemic current and future challenges. Moreover, previous research has recognized that tourism firms' innovation efforts are often made individually and independently by various tourism stakeholders, although collaborative networks have been recognized as a competitive advantage for tourism companies' innovativeness (Martínez-Román, 2015).