Overview
This role supports the World Bank’s mission by accelerating digital transformation in the tourism sector to increase jobs, competitiveness, and resilience. The position will help client countries adopt scalable digital approaches to improve destination management, visitor services, SME competitiveness, and investment promotion.
Tasks Summary
- Provide technical assistance to design and implement digital tourism strategies, blueprints, and roadmaps.
- Advise on policy, institutional, and governance reforms enabling digital tourism transformation.
- Develop and disseminate practical guidance such as frameworks, standards, templates, and toolkits.
- Identify emerging trends and support pilots that can be replicated and scaled.
- Foster partnerships with governments, tourism boards, local communities, private sector platforms, SMEs, academia, and development partners.
- Advise on defining, designing, and implementing tourism data platforms.
- Support establishment of data governance and interoperability approaches.
- Provide guidance on analytics and AI use cases.
- Translate regulatory requirements into digital-ready requirements.
- Support clients to design and implement digital destination management solutions.
- Promote omnichannel service design.
- Support “life-event” and journey-based service models.
- Advise on interventions to accelerate digital adoption by tourism SMEs.
- Support design of shared digital services for SMEs.
- Provide guidance on enabling environment issues.
- Support digital approaches to monitor and manage sustainability and heritage protection.
- Advise on integrating climate and hazard information into tourism planning and operations.
- Support design and testing of destination digital twins.
- Provide hands-on support to World Bank operations.
- Deliver training, workshops, and coaching for client counterparts.
- Contribute to knowledge products and communities of practice.
Experience Requirements
- Minimum 8 years of relevant experience in digital tourism, destination management, tourism analytics, digital transformation in services sectors, or comparable roles supporting public-private ecosystems.
- Proven ability to translate tourism sector priorities into feasible digital solutions, including target architectures, phased roadmaps, indicative budgets, and results frameworks.
- Strong expertise in at least two of the following: (i) tourism data platforms, market intelligence, and analytics/AI for tourism (ii) destination management systems and visitor journey/service design (iii) SME digitization and digital marketplace enablement (iv) digital marketing, content ecosystems, and customer engagement systems (v) interoperability, registries, and digital public infrastructure linkages relevant to tourism.
- Practical experience with data governance, privacy-by-design, and secure sharing of public-private data.
- Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP concepts), cybersecurity principles, and scalable architectures for public-sector and public-private solutions.
- Excellent stakeholder engagement and facilitation skills.
- Ability to work in cross-cultural, multidisciplinary teams and adapt to resource-constrained environments.
Qualification Requirements
• Master’s degree in tourism management, economics, public policy, information systems, computer science, data analytics, or a related field combining tourism sector experience with digital transformation expertise.
