The Potential of 5G Technology Applied to Tourism Marketing

Introduction

Historically technological developments in the world, and especially in the Western, were guided by revolutions, such as those reflected in Eric Hobsbawm's masterful work, the Age of Revolutions. Today, already distant from the first Industrial Revolution, we are living the often called 4th Industrial Revolution. Since the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, industry 4.0 has been talking about the prospect of making major changes in the way of production processes and service delivery are understood. We are living in a new rupture era that contains an extremely positive force and that calls into question the old relationship between men and machines. This relationship could be seen as a more symbiotic one. We may be in the presence of disruptive innovation that offers us more affordable products and services, that are able to solve people's real problems, making them available to a much wider range of users. However, the changes they bring about in the markets should not be so abrupt that they lose sight of the concept of sustainability which, at first glance, may be far from the concept of disruptive innovation (Cândido, 2011).

In fact, the times we live in are of enormous technological effervescence, in an age of speed and alongside it, of fast obsolescence. Closely following the present technological revolution may reduce our distancing perspective. With the beginning of the 20th decade of the 21st century, 5G technology officially takes off, once again establishing a milestone in the history of modern civilization.

To understand the impact of 5G it is necessary to consider the entire evolutionary process that has been operating for a few decades, guided by technological achievements made at different paces since the beginning of the Internet. Much has happened since the “Web 1.0 as web of cognition i.e., read only web” and the new assumptions of “Web 4.0 as Ultra-Intelligent Electronic Agent i.e., read-write-execution web with concurrency and Web 5.0 as a quasi-emotive web described as fifth-generation web” (Patel, 2013). The new generation of mobile internet has been the subject of enormous attention because it has left the scope of laboratories to begin to deploy strongly in the different markets and truly affect the lives of its users and the organisms that have been at the forefront of its application. Time is still experimentation in relation to the behavior of the technological arsenal that we currently have. It is time to prove the effectiveness of the new generation of mobile broadband and verification in relation to increasing the speed of information transmission, reduction of latency, the capacity that the new technology must support a greater number of connected devices simultaneously and at the same time substantially reduce energy consumption (Sastre et al., 2019).

In the field of tourism, 5G technology can profoundly change the lives of businesses and tourists, changing the way all these activities faced. This change suggested the design of a new wireless network infrastructure and a new way of looking at communications and sharing large data (Allen, 2019). With the use of 5G technology, it is expected that tourists are more interconnected through sharing at social networks, a behavior that will benefit the economic development of the places visited and especially those farther from large urban centers. Undoubtedly, it will provide greater levels of partnership between tourism companies, organizations, and telecommunications companies. It is believed that tourism will be one of the sectors that will benefit the most from the innovations proposed by 5G. The tourism industry will achieve enormous benefits by offering its customers a more pleasant, accessible, and personalized tourist practice. This reality is assisted by the fact that the Millennials generation and Generation Z, an important percentage of number of tourists. These targets, have been born and raised with new technologies and are the ones who effectively take advantage of them in holiday destinations places, through their predisposition to use them. According to Mangold and Smith (2012) quoted Epuran and Ivasciuc, S. (2019) “Millennials access digital media daily and can communicate with and purchase from suppliers anywhere in the world”.

For marketing, the management of customer experiences throughout the various moments of interaction with goods or services is important for customer satisfaction (Kotler & Armstrong, 2021). As tourism is made of experiences and when the tourist experiences them, people hope to have emotion that will create memories that are part of his/hers personal universe. Thus, for marketing in tourism product management, it is important to optimize emotional experiences by leveraging 5G technology.