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The tourism country’s competitiveness is important especially when countries strive for bigger market shares as European countries are. The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating effects on tourism and the entire tourism industry must be rethinking and reshaping given some opportunities and challenges to the entrepreneurs, local communities, local administrations, governments of competitiveness destinations. In this paper we measured if the Google and Apple mobility indices cand predict (or not) the movement of TTCI during pandemic compared with pre-pandemic TTCI ranks by using grey system theory and statistical methods. The aim of the paper is to validate the Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) as identifier of the good predictor (statistically significant for p-value< 0.05) for European tourism competitiveness (measured by TTCI) in particular conditions, especially before and during COVID-19 pandemic time by take into consideration the Google Mobility and Apple Mobility data and their relationship with overnight stays for 11 European countries. To validate the GRA as method for good and accurate predictor for tourism competitiveness for TTCI 2021 (during COVID-19 pandemic time) a GLM – General Linear Model ANOVA with interaction effects and Tukey HSD Post Hoc Multiple Comparisons was applied. Our results validated the powerful of GRA for tourism competitiveness, statistically significant according to GLM with interaction effects, and emphasis (especially for entrepreneurs) that the overnight stays will give the right rank on top of tourism competitiveness, prior to other ITC support as Google and Apple Mobility indices proved by reflection of overnights on TTCI 2021 – during pandemic.

The current trend in tourism is no longer one of relaxation in the two important seasons but of experiential tourism, developing of new types of tourism, each country identifying (but especially reinventing) its own potential and promoting it below the form of innovative tourist packages and/or products and/or services. Innovation as a concept is setting up the scene for economic growth and is an important tool for economic progress and competitiveness. The aim of this research is to make a bibliometric analysis to find out the most important aspects of innovation linked to tourism as sustainable solutions for tourism in emerging economies. As methods for bibliometric analysis the VOSviewer 1.6.18 software was used on the Web of Science papers to find out the research concepts linked to innovation and tourism. Also, we applied Google Trends search for some of the newest types of tourism to find out the interest of tourists over the last two decades (2010 – 2023) for innovative products from tourism industry (such as: babymoon, adventure, medical, dental, hunting, ecotourism, heritage, museum, etc.). The results emphasis the relation between innovation, tourism, information technology (internet, smart tourism, innovative technology), stakeholders (governments, organizations, municipalities, communities), tourism experience, tourism destination, tourism services, product innovation, competitiveness advantages, economic development, performance, cultural heritage, rural area, ecotourism.