As second coronavirus lockdowns clamp into place around the world, tourism is hardly top of the pops for most people.

Indeed, discussing this topic with Mélanie Duparc, the director of Smart Cities & Sport, elicited the apparently less than comforting fact that some international experts believe tourism as it existed before the pandemic will not be "back to normal" until 2024.

I say "apparently". Because, upon closer inspection what we understand by "tourism" appears to be changing its form - partly through necessity, partly through ingenuity.

"What is really interesting now is the creativity of different cities," said Duparc. "Cities now are preparing the way they want their tourist in the future. What kind of branding do they want? Do they want to be more selective? Do they want to be more specific? What kind of aspect of their identity do they want to promote abroad?

"And the other approach that we have seen with cities now is to have a more local approach. So cities are targeting maybe national or local level tourism. And to have that kind of active tourism is very helpful because you can also have your own inhabitants discovering your city in a tourist-like way.

"We had a presentation for an app, called Runnin’City - it’s just a way to discover your city, or another city when we will be allowed to travel again, with a historical and cultural approach. It is really a way to re-invent a city and to make it attractive even for your own inhabitants.

"So I would say tourism is still active even during these difficult times of pandemic."

The presentation was made by one of the app’s co-founders, Olivier Lebleu, and he made out an appealing case for an innovation that seeks to broaden the reach of the current range of available performance aids, enriching it with new levels of interesting information about one’s immediate environment.

So instead of just being able to reassure yourself about how you crushed five kilometres, you can also take on board the fact that the mound you have just run past used to be a dungeon where they held religious Dissenters, or that the Church you have just skirted was half destroyed by German bombs in 1943.

Lebleu maintains that there are "400 million runners" worldwide - a figure I have no reason to doubt, nor means of confirming - adding:  "If it were a country, it would be the third largest  in the world, behind China and India.

"But if you add to this all the people who just want to walk, people who cycle, who ride their scooters, people who go in their wheelchair, the potential number of customers and users is far bigger than the 400 million runners."

He goes on to say that performance apps basically just ask you to perform - "and that only interests, in our view, about 10 to 15 per cent of all the users.

"We believe that the market for experience is far bigger than the market for performance.

"But the good thing as well is that we can work alongside performance apps to provide both an experience and to record your performance."

Lebleu maintains his product - a mix between a vocal Global Positioning System (GPS) and a multi-media, multi-lingual audio guide - bridges the gap between users and any city in which they find themselves.

"Runnin’City guides you through the city vocally and comments on every point of interest as you pass by," he said, adding that they also integrate live data to give indications, for example, warnings of local allergen and pollution levels.

The app has already earned a number of awards. Before the pandemic it was being utilised to good effect by big cities hosting marathons or other large sporting events, but also by smaller cities and even small villages which were putting on their own events and wanted the novel influx of folk to appreciate their new surroundings to the max.

During these troubled times, of course, people are not setting off for distant new locations. But that, rather than quashing tourism, has re-shaped it into a more localised and intensive form.

“Of course less and less people are travelling large distances during the pandemic,” Leblue accepts. "We don’t tend to get the same crowds, and we have not reached yet the number of people that were using the app before the outbreak.

"However we see more people are rediscovering their own cities and also their local regions, maybe by driving to their next small city.

"We are counting on a lot of interest from different cities to be able to offer different experiences for their own inhabitants and also for their tourlsts who are coming just from nearby.

"You see in the hotel world that everybody is pushing experiences. Take Airbnb - they want you to know now about the local area, to understand everything local.

"We are going towards a completely different tourism and also a completely different sport."