Keywords
business model
Business Model Canvas
digital transformation
digital platforms
stakeholder survey
service economy
Uzbekistan
How to Cite
Abstract
Uzbekistan’s tourism industry is growing at a record pace, yet whether this demand-side expansion is matched by a digital reconfiguration of the industry’s business model remains unexplored. The study aims to identify how digital transformation is changing the sector-level business model of tourism in Uzbekistan and where the largest digital gaps persist. The Business Model Canvas is adapted from the firm to the industry level, and secondary data for 2019–2025 are combined with a survey of 81 tourism stakeholders – tour operators, hotels, public bodies, IT providers and tourism education institutions, mainly from the Bukhara tourism cluster – who assessed the current digital maturity of the nine canvas blocks and identified the blocks expected to change most by 2030. Stakeholder-assessed maturity is uniformly high (block means from 3.85 to 4.12), with customer-facing blocks rated highest, whereas expectations of change concentrate on data-based key activities (59.5 %), value propositions (50.6 %) and channels (49.4 %). The digital-gap index reveals an asymmetric pattern: the customer interface is regarded as digitised, while the “engine” of the model – data-driven marketing, payments and digital investment – awaits transformation. The leading barriers are human and institutional rather than infrastructural. A target platform-ecosystem business model is proposed. The contribution lies in a sector-level application of the canvas and a transferable stakeholder-based gap-assessment method.
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