PHOENIX - Digital Tourism Month

PHOENIX - Tourism Innovation Hub is a Palestine-based collaboration platform that enables tourism-focused innovation and entrepreneurial ventures to address the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow, with a special focus on tech-based innovation. The platform is a partnership between Palestine Technopark and Jerusalem High-Tech Foundry (JHF), established to maximize the value of a holistic, regenerative, sustainable, and equitable tourism sector in Palestine.

Palestine has a wealth of cultural heritage that spans millennia, which traditionally made it a key tourism destination. However, the Palestinian tourism value-chain has many challenges and lost opportunities, mostly falling under the umbrella of maximizing the value of a holistic, regenerative, sustainable, and equitable tourism sector. These include, but are not limited to:

• Lack of a holistic tourism product offering (attractions, activities, and services) beyond the traditional religious offering
• Uncompetitive offering to cater to the free independent travelers (FIT) - the majority of tourists coming to historic Palestine
• Lack of tourism geographic dispersion and underutilization of cultural heritage assets and attractions spread across Palestine
• Lack of an equitable economic benefit to the host communities
• Lacking tourism value-chain digitization and up-to-date digitized tourism information.

Through PHOENIX, the partners aim to address these challenges and capitalize on the opportunities by fostering tech-based innovation and entrepreneurship in the tourism sector. The platform will provide access to resources, mentorship, networking opportunities, and more to support startups and entrepreneurs in developing innovative solutions to enhance the Palestinian tourism experience.

Digital Tourism Month is an initiative organized by the Phoenix - Tourism Innovation Hub. The event will take place annually in June and aims to critically explore and innovate solutions for the Palestinian tourism sector's challenges and opportunities. 

The objectives include:

• Identifying key challenges and trends.
• Exposing participants to tourism solution trends such as digitization and automation.
• Innovating new tourism offerings through startups and new businesses.

The target audience includes stakeholders in the Palestinian tourism value chain, technology sector professionals, and business and tourism specialists. The goal is to test startup ideas, advance Palestine's tourism and tech entrepreneurial community, and launch new high-growth startups. The event will include a Tourism Sector Workshop and a Tourism Hackathon.