Success story · Turismo de Aragón · ITA

Spain Living Labs

Living Labs across the territory

Case summary

A living laboratory of tourism innovation that turns the Aragonese Pyrenees into a real environment for testing solutions based on data, IoT, AI and phygital experiences.

Spain Living Labs turns the Aragonese Pyrenees into a living laboratory of tourism innovation: a real environment with fourteen specialised Living Labs where Artificial Intelligence, digital twins, IoT and Mixed Reality are applied on the ground to transform the visitor experience and destination management. Driven by Turismo de Aragón and the Technological Institute of Aragon (ITA) together with Libelium, Embou and Imascono, the project puts the most advanced technology at the service of people, the territory and the economic development of one of Europe's most renowned mountain regions.

Client

Turismo de Aragón · ITA

Sector

Tourism

Service

Digital twin

Specialised Living Labs on the ground

1.5M

Visitors in Huesca (2024)

Technologies: AI, twins, IoT, Mixed Reality

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01 The challenge

Turning a destination into a smart territory

The tourism sector is undergoing a deep transformation: destinations need to decide faster and better, travellers demand personalised, immersive experiences, and local businesses seek new ways to connect with a hyper-connected visitor. Yet most territories still operate with fragmented data, disconnected tools and a limited view of what is happening around them. The question wasn't whether tourism should be digitalised, but how to do it strategically, scalably and with real impact on the territory: how to turn a destination into a smart ecosystem capable of anticipating trends, enriching the visitor experience and creating value for every stakeholder.

02 The solution

A living laboratory of smart tourism

Spain Living Labs was created to turn the Aragonese Pyrenees into a real environment in which to design, test and scale solutions that redefine how a destination is managed and experienced. Travellers access a navigable digital twin of the territory with its villages, routes and monuments, an AI recommender, smart audio guides adapted to their profile and historical avatars that recount the Pyrenean legacy. Destination managers have real-time flow data, visitor analytics dashboards, segmentation for campaigns and occupancy alerts. And local businesses gain visibility in the recommender, impact metrics for their area and new channels of contact with visitors.

Next step

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Key learnings

What this case teaches the sector.

From the individual attraction to the smart territory

Most tourism digitalisation projects operate at the level of a hotel, a museum or an isolated attraction. Addressing a whole territory as a single digital unit changes the scale: the destination's competitiveness stops depending on each individual business and starts resting on the shared intelligence of the whole.

Data activates three audiences at once

A single data layer —IoT, AI, digital twins and phygital experiences— simultaneously activates three levers that usually live apart: a personalised experience for the traveller, real-time analytics for the destination manager and new visibility channels for the local business. Data stops being a technical resource.

Territorial intelligence demands a consortium

No single player can digitalise a destination alone. Spain Living Labs aligns public administration, connectivity, IoT sensing, technology research and user experience in one shared vision. Each partner brings a complementary capability, and it is that sum —not any one technology— that makes a territory smart.

The destination as a digital product

Spain Living Labs puts forward a powerful idea for the tourism sector: to stop thinking of the destination as a collection of hotels, restaurants, tourist offices and attractions, and start treating it as a unified digital product. When travellers interact with a single ecosystem —before, during and after the trip— the experience gains coherence, the destination gains presence and the local business gains visibility.

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