SOCIETY & ”INDUSTRY 4.0”
Does Tourism 4.0 answers the needs of baby-boomers?
New technologies have lately decisively entered our personal lives as well as penetrated our businesses, including tourism. Our paper discusses the role of technology in transformation of traditional high-touch services, co-created by tourism personnel, into high-tech services performed by tourists themselves in ‘do-it-your-self” (DIY) way. The participant-observation research method has been applied to present the problem. The results point out certain types of services that are becoming hardly available to tourists without adequate digital equipment and certain technical competence. DIY type of services can be particularly challenging to the ‘silver’ tourists of the baby-boom cohort who are typically not as digitally competent as is younger travelling generation. The findings open serious questioning over general ability of tourists to physically, psychologically and culturally follow the pace of such technological change.