Abstract
The aim of the chapter is to point the importance of eco-innovation and IT technologies for the sustainable development of health and recreational tourism in Serbia. The subject of the research is the rehabilitation center in Eastern Serbia. The main idea of the chapter is to show how those hospital institutions use artificial intelligence-IT technologies for improving recovery services to patients in the post-COVID condition. The chapter will discuss the most common types of support and measures to facilitate the functioning of eco-tourism in Serbia with the aim to adopt good practices of developed countries (Hungary). Ecological tourism takes place in areas of pure and preserved nature. The contribution of the chapter is to point to new strategies in spa tourism, to shorten the time and reduce business costs. This would contribute to the sustainability of tourism.
TopIntroduction
In today's time of modern business, the most important thing for all types of organizations is to accept changes. The sooner organizations adapt and introduce new innovative business techniques, the sooner they will be competitive in the market. However, with the globalization of the concept of sustainable development, every business has taken the premise of the sustainability.
Key Terms in this Chapter
ELECTRE (ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité - Elimination and Choice Expressing the REality): Family methods, designed for multiple criteria decision aiding. These methods use as a preference model an outranking relation on the set of actions - it is constructed as a result of concordance and non-discordance tests involving a specific input preference information.
Post-COVID Condition: Condition after suffering from COVID-19 virus, which requires a serious approach to patients, i.e. serious treatment. The most common problems in post-COVID conditions are psychological.
Spa Tourism: Spa tourism as the use of thermal, mineral, and thermal-mineral waters, for treatment, rehabilitation, and recreation where numerous recreational, sports, and cultural activities are held.
Wellness: Originates as a coin of two terms, well-being, and fitness, denoting the orientation towards the maximum use of the potential of individuals. This primarily includes activities that affect the improvement of the physical and mental structure of the personality, such as a healthy diet, regular exercise, active lifestyle, quality time spent with friends and family, etc.
MCDM (Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods): Decision-making at all levels in the organization should be based on stimulating competitive proposals and choosing the best possible alternative for business. It sets three levels of decision-making: strategic decisions - which have a long-term effect, tactical decisions - which represent decisions for the next business year, and operational decisions that include daily organizational activities. The various methods of MCDM help managers to choose the one that is best for achieving the set goals from all the offered alternatives.
AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process): Is a structured technique of MCDM for organizing and analyzing complex decisions, based on mathematics and psychology. Individual experts’ experiences are utilized to estimate the relative magnitudes of factors through pair-wise comparisons. Also, AHP enables the evaluation of alternatives with unclear and very subjective criteria. An inconsistency index is calculated for each estimation matrix, which represents how much is expert well filled in the assessment matrix, i.e. how much he respected the principle of transitivity.
Tourist Attraction: Is a particularly attractive tourist attraction destinations, of a natural or social character within the tourist space: natural attractions, cultural attractions, museums, historical heritage, events of the different spectrum, entertainment, etc.
Competitiveness of Tourism Destination: Is the ability to increase tourism expenditure, to increasingly attract visitors while providing them with satisfying, memorable experiences, and to do so in a profitable way, while enhancing the well-being of destination residents and preserving the natural capital of the destination for future generations.