Applied Research | Tourism in Practice
A two-day event where tourism students work on live industry challenges, alongside the professionals and organisations they will one day work for.
AI is developing at a pace that makes it genuinely difficult to keep curricula current, both in what is taught and in how tourism is now practised. Students graduate into an industry that has changed considerably since their programme was designed.
At the same time, entry-level roles are declining. Research consistently attributes a growing share of this to AI automation. The graduates who will find and sustain careers are those who arrive with applied, professional-grade skills, not those who need to be trained from scratch.
There is also a gap running in the other direction. Destination organisations are working through questions that applied research could genuinely support, but the mechanisms for that kind of collaboration rarely exist in practice. FRONTIERS is designed to address both.
FRONTIERS takes place in the week of World Tourism Day, with the event running across the week commencing 21 September and the day itself falling on 27 September 2026. The timing is deliberate: it gives the event a moment of broader industry significance and a natural context for institutions and destination professionals to come together.
Applied Sprints, Expert Perspectives, Industry Debate
Day 1 brings together students and destination professionals for a programme that moves between applied sprint work, industry talks, and facilitated debate. Sprints are interjected with expert perspectives from practitioners and researchers, and some challenges are built directly around leading research initiatives in the field.
The format is competitive but collegiate. Teams work on live challenges using purpose-built digital environments, with industry mentors alongside them throughout. Talks and panels run between sprint stages, giving the day both depth and momentum.
Teaching Tourism in an AI Era
A working day for academic staff and industry practitioners. The morning is structured around shared reflection: how AI is changing the teaching environment, what that means for assessment and curriculum, and what the industry now observes in graduates entering the workforce.
The afternoon moves into collaborative action. Participants work together on curriculum design, building tools and approaches they can take back to their institutions. Outputs are published and shared across all attending institutions.
Day 1 is a full public event for students and industry professionals. Four panel discussions address how AI is reshaping employment, career pathways, and professional practice in tourism. Alongside the panels, student teams work on live industry challenges using purpose-built sprint environments throughout the day.
The day closes with a Student Takeover: Masters students presenting design challenge outputs, thesis work, and applied innovations to the same audience of industry professionals who have been in the room all day.
The day closes with short presentations from Masters students: design challenge outputs, thesis work, and applied research — in front of the same audience of industry professionals.
Student teams working on live industry challenges throughout the day
FRONTIERS sprint challenges are drawn from the themes of CAMPUS 2026, the DTTT annual programme on sustainability strategy and destination innovation, taking place in the Turku Archipelago, Finland, in late September and early October 2026.
The themes, from circular economy to regenerative action to futures thinking, are not abstract. They are the questions tourism organisations are actively working through, and the questions universities are preparing students to engage with. The connection between FRONTIERS and CAMPUS makes the sprint work immediately relevant to both sides.
The strongest FRONTIERS sprint outputs will be showcased to the destination professionals gathering at CAMPUS, giving student work direct visibility with the industry at the moment it is exploring exactly the same questions.
The best FRONTIERS sprint outputs are recognised at a dedicated showcase, and winning teams will have the opportunity to present their work to the destination professionals and sustainability practitioners gathering at CAMPUS 2026 in Turku, Finland.
Day 2 brings academic staff and industry professionals together for two distinct sessions. The morning is about understanding what is changing and why. The afternoon is about building something useful in response.
Observations, challenges, and the wider landscape
A facilitated session where academic staff from participating institutions share what they are seeing: what AI is doing to student work, to assessment, to the relationship between taught content and industry practice. Industry professionals contribute a parallel view, the skills gap as they encounter it when graduates arrive.
The aim is a clear shared picture of where higher education in tourism currently stands in relation to the industry it serves, and what that means for how the subject is taught going forward.
Building approaches together, not in parallel
The afternoon shifts into active working sessions. Participants work across institutions on specific curriculum challenges, developing tools, frameworks, and approaches they can take back and use. What is built is shared with all attending institutions as part of the published output.
DTTT facilitates but does not prescribe. The value comes from the practitioners in the room working together on problems they share.
The DTTT AI Transparency Framework is the first open, sector-specific standard for how tourism organisations record, measure, and disclose their use of AI. Published in March 2026, it is the basis of an emerging professional norm that higher education has a clear role in teaching.
Universities are currently navigating AI without a professional standard to teach against. The DTTT framework provides one: four independently versioned models covering what AI contributed to a piece of work, the time and resource implications of that use, the environmental costs involved, and whether the content produced was ethically sound.
Teaching students to apply this framework, grading real work, completing ethics assessments, producing disclosure records, gives them a professional skill that destination organisations will increasingly look for in graduates. It is also something that cannot be taught from a textbook alone: it requires practice with real outputs in professional contexts.
Partner institutions receive structured teaching materials, exercises, and assessment frameworks for all four models. The framework is published under Creative Commons and can be embedded directly into existing modules.
ai.thinkdigital.travelA five-point A to E scale for recording and communicating AI involvement in any piece of work, applicable to any output type.
Measures time savings and delivery extension. Supports disclosure to clients, boards, commissioners, and funders.
An indicative A to E scale for communicating the relative energy intensity of AI use. A disclosure tool for organisations reporting on their AI activity.
A risk classifier for the ethical dimensions of AI-generated content, covering consent, authenticity, and audience disclosure.
FRONTIERS is the launch point for the DTTT Academia Programme, but the programme itself runs year-round. Partner institutions gain access to a sustained set of resources, tools, and community connections that support both student development and faculty work throughout the academic year. What is announced at FRONTIERS shapes what partner institutions have access to for 2026 and 2027.
A purpose-built digital learning environment, specific to destination management and tourism. Modular and accessible throughout the academic year, covering AI tools, evaluation, ethics, and professional application in a tourism context.
Teaching materials, exercises, and assessment frameworks for embedding the DTTT standard into existing modules. Open licence, no additional cost, and directly relevant to the skills the industry is starting to expect.
Academic membership includes places at all three DTTT annual events: FRONTIERS, XDW (the Destination AI Intensive, Brussels) and CAMPUS (Turku Archipelago). Students and staff participate alongside senior practitioners from destination organisations worldwide.
A structured pathway for institutions and students to contribute to DTTT's research community, with working groups on the AI Transparency Framework, case study contribution, and published outputs attributed to contributing institutions.
Selected student work is featured in the FRONTIERS annual report and circulated through the DTTT network. For students, it is a direct route to professional visibility with the organisations they are training to work for.
Full access to DTTT's library of intelligence reports, use case studies, and published outputs from across the member network. Built for practitioners, directly relevant as teaching and research material.
FRONTIERS functions because all three are present. Each gets something distinct, and the value of the combination is greater than any single part.
FRONTIERS is structured work on live problems, with real industry professionals, producing outputs that are published and attributed. The skills developed here are the ones that increasingly distinguish graduates in a market where entry-level roles are changing rapidly.
FRONTIERS gives programmes something that is difficult to build independently: direct, structured industry collaboration with documented outputs and a year-round professional development resource for staff and students.
DTTT member organisations bring real briefs to FRONTIERS. Student teams from tourism and related disciplines work on them with a perspective that has not yet been shaped by the conventions of the sector. Participation is included in DTTT destination membership.
FRONTIERS 2026 takes place in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, in the week of World Tourism Day. Institutions bring student cohorts for Day 1 and academic staff for Day 2. Places are available through the DTTT Academia Programme.
If your institution is not yet a partner, FRONTIERS is a natural starting point. The conversation begins with your programme and student cohort, and the Academia Programme provides the year-round structure that FRONTIERS connects into.
Whether you are bringing a student cohort to Day 1, joining us as academic staff for Day 2, or finding out more about the 2026–27 Academia Programme, we would like to hear from you.