# Complete Semantics to empower Touristic Service Providers

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how implementing comprehensive schema.org semantic annotations can significantly enhance online visibility for touristic service providers, reducing reliance on intermediaries and improving search engine understanding.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a large-scale application of schema.org annotations to improve online presence of touristic services in Tyrol, Austria, showcasing practical deployment and benefits.

## Key findings

- Increased online visibility for Tyrol's tourism sector.
- Reduced dependency on online travel agencies.
- Enhanced search engine understanding of touristic content.

## Abstract

The tourism industry has a significant impact on the world's economy, contributes 10.2% of the world's gross domestic product in 2016. It becomes a very competitive industry, where having a strong online presence is an essential aspect for business success. To achieve this goal, the proper usage of latest Web technologies, particularly schema.org annotations is crucial. In this paper, we present our effort to improve the online visibility of touristic service providers in the region of Tyrol, Austria, by creating and deploying a substantial amount of semantic annotations according to schema.org, a widely used vocabulary for structured data on the Web. We started our work from Tourismusverband (TVB) Mayrhofen-Hippach and all touristic service providers in the Mayrhofen-Hippach region and applied the same approach to other TVBs and regions, as well as other use cases. The rationale for doing this is straightforward. Having schema.org annotations enables search engines to understand the content better, and provide better results for end users, as well as enables various intelligent applications to utilize them. As a direct consequence, the region of Tyrol and its touristic service increase their online visibility and decrease the dependency on intermediaries, i.e. Online Travel Agency (OTA).