ABSTRACT
People, states, society and entrepreneurs across the globe become digitally driven, leveraging the twenty-first-century digital technology innovations to their advantage. Digitalization helps tourism and events become innovative and dynamic, thus becoming strategic and demand-driven. Although festivals originated primordially within the communal socio-cultural fabric, scholars often include those in niche tourism and event categories. Of late, it turns out to be a crucial motivator and driver for tourism and event offering formulation and destination imaging and branding. Practices of sharing information and emotional impression in digital space change the festival visitors’ demands, choices, and experience patterns overtly, encouraging destination, tourism, and festival-event stakeholders to use digital space to market redesigned festival-event experiences authentically. A new ecology emerged then, coevolving a digital application assisted network among festival-event-centric tourism stakeholders and digitally armed consumers. This chapter studies the expanse of digital application in the Durga festival of Kolkata, a significant tourism motivator for the city. It reveals the dynamics of digital applications in this festival and reviews the shifts and socio-economic impacts overtly visible due to digitalization.
