UNITAR CIFAL Jeju organised an online workshop on “Resilience through Digitalization: Building Better Tourism Policies” on March 31 to April 6, 2022. The workshop invited 70 participants from 33 countries, including Bangladesh, Bhutan, United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Démocratic Republic of Congo, Fiji, France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Tunisia, and Vietnam.

The three-day workshop was composed of (1)experts’ presentations, (2)group activities and (3)group presentations. The first session featured four invited experts, Mr. Matthias Helble, a Scientist in the Research for Health, World Health Organization (WHO), Mr Graham Harper, Director of Sustainability & Social Responsibility, Pacific Asia Tourism Association, Mr Joon-ho Lee, Deputy Director of Digital Innovation Team, Korea Tourism Organization (KTO), and Mr Nick Hall, Founder & CEO, Digital Tourism Think Tank. The four speakers covered issues such as how to use big data in safely resuming tourism, digital strategy and benchmarking for destinations digitalization, digital innovation tourism with the case of Korea, and risk and crisis management for the resilient destination.

The last two-day session primarily allowed participants to discuss and analyze five country cases on key policy recommendations and barriers to accelerating the digitalization of local destinations. Design Thinking tool was adopted for a group activity, which specialized in tourism digital strategies. This activity was evaluated to be practical and helpful for local actors to understand the digital ecosystem and to localize their digital policy action plans effectively.