GFT, an IT company specializing in digital transformation, and IESE Business School have launched the GFT Sustainability Awards for Tourism, whose winner will receive a prize of 10,000 euros. This is the first sustainable tourism investment forum that seeks to promote solutions that promote positive, sustainable and comprehensive change in the Spanish tourism industry.
To do this, projects aimed at generating impact through digital technologies and tools will be selected. Proposals must seek one of these purposes:
- Help achieve the SDG objectives in the tourism industry through optimal waste management with a circular economy.
- Improve the user experience by digitizing and automating processes with the client.
- Develop smart hotels or tourist infrastructures that are more respectful of water and energy consumption, etc.
In short, the event seeks to help any idea that contributes to improve sustainability, within the hotel and tourism industry. The term is open until February 20.
Requirements to present
The projects that are interested in opting for the 10,000 euro prize must meet the following requirements:
- Be actively seeking external financing.
- be already on the market.
- Have a team dedicated entirely to the project
From all the applications, eight finalists will be chosen who will defend their projects before more than 200 investors from the IESE Business Angels Network, during a face-to-face event which will take place on March 22, at the Madrid headquarters of this institution and which will also have the option of remote connection from the Barcelona headquarters. Among the members of the jury who will evaluate the finalists are experts from companies such as Meliá, Avoris, Paradores, Banc Sabadell, Fluidra, Grupo Barceló, Hotusa, Exceltur or the Xunta de Galicia.
Manuel Lavín, CEO of GFT Spain, has declared: “We are committed to putting technology and innovation at the service of sustainability. In this sense, the tourism industry has enormous potential to improve and we are going to prove it with the fantastic disruptive proposals that we will see in this Forum”.
For his part, the founder of the IESE Business Angels and Family Offices network, Professor Juan Roure, said: “Lhe importance of sustainable innovation in tourism as a driving force for the industry in the future, an industry hit hard by the pandemic, which needs to recover and find a differentiating value to get back to the starting point. Innovation and sustainability are two cornerstones to carry out this recovery”.
