Tourism, Data Protection and COVID-19 Caterina del Federico1 Introduction; 1. Why the need to focus on privacy?; 2. Smart Tourism Destinations; 3. The relevance of the General Data Protection Regulation; Conclusions. INTRODUCTION We can affirm that the tourism sector, among the leading ones of the world economy, but also one of the most fragile one, is facing a situation never seen before. For sure, the immediate profiles concern: pending contracts, ticket refunds, tax incentives2 and so on3. However, probably the most important aspect actually regards technology and related legal aspects. Although many experts have predicted catastrophic data, the industry of tourism is trying, with a thousand alternatives, to recover and face the situation to be ready and, hopefully stronger, once the “acute” phase is over. The situation we are living leads us to rethink our services, our habits, our work and the tourism sector as well. Thus, we can state that one of the fields called to the digital challenge is that of the tourism and leisure industries – from “seeing and doing” to “living and feeling” someone has affirmed4. 1 University of Bologna 2 That of tax incentive was already a much-debated topic before the COVID-19 pandemic, at least in Italy; with regards to the Italian framework in the specific field of tax law see R. Cordeiro Guerra, A. Pace, C. Verrigni, A. Viotto (edited by), Finanza pubblica e misure tributarie per il patrimonio culturale, Giappichelli, 2019. 3 For an overview on the main problems deriving from COVID-19 restrictions on the tourism sector, see S. Gossling, D. Scott and C. M. Hall, Pandemics, tourism and global change: a rapid assessment of covid-19, in Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Vol. 29, 1, 2020. 4 For this expression, see E. Bressani and E. Marzano, Digital Experience: Culture & Tourism, available in https://www.eng.it/resources/whitepaper/doc/culture_tourism/CULTURE_TOURISM_instantpaper_ eng.pdf.
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