Smart governance for heritage tourism destinations: Contextual factors and destination management organization perspectives

Abstract

The sustainable development of tourism is a major concern for destination management organisations (DMOs) in heritage tourism. Smart tourism advocates claim that technologicallydriven innovations can help DMOs to optimise tourism development by addressing issues such as carrying capacity, stakeholder management and community involvement. This study enhances the understanding of smart tourism governance (SG), showing how contextual factors affect DMO perspectives of SG. A mixed-methods approach was used to investigate heritage tourism destinations in the United Kingdom. The results demonstrate that well-established DMOs do not perceive SG as potentially beneficial, as they already perform well in many areas in which SG promises improvements, such as citizen engagement, decision-making, and stakeholder engagement. Despite this, this research highlights the aspects of SG that these destinations can take advantage of as social inclusion, environmental performance and the provision of citizen-centric services. All of these can help heritage tourism destinations to optimise their tourism development. This research additionally demonstrates the effect of contextual factors, such as the level of public-sector support for tourism and the growing influence of non-tourism stakeholders in destination management, on DMO perceptions of SG and makes recommendations for how developments in the use of SG by DMOs can be made, in light of these.

Urban Metabolism: Definition of an Integrated Framework to Assess and Plan Cities and Territories

“…An equitable context of investigation is environmental planning and management, with particular regard to the design and assessment of projects inspired by Nature-Based Solution approach (NBS) (Quagliolo et al 2023). Last, but not least, the context of sustainable tourism planning could trigger interesting insights in terms of design of circular policies and actions, since projects and interventions developed in tourism destinations impact strongly on the environment, where local communities consensus could not be always reached (Cimnaghi and Mussini 2015;Mandić and Kennell 2021).…”

Smart tourism destination model development in Danau Toba, Indonesia

“…The idea about smart city served as the inspiration for the first smart tourism destination (Bulchand-gidumal, 2022;Gelter et al, 2022bGelter et al, , 2022aMandi & Kennell, 2021b). A "smart city" is one that can increase its residents' quality of life while also becoming more competitive (Borghys, 2020).…”

“…Recently, developed Asian countries such as China, Taiwan, and South Korea are very enthusiastic about implementing smart tourism to increase the selling value industry of tourism (García-milon, Juaneda-ayensa, Olarte-pascual, & Pelegrín-borondo, 2020). The implementation of Smart Tourism has made a lot of progress to develop tourism that is oriented towards business information technology (Luo & Zhou, 2021;Mandi & Kennell, 2021a). Based on research (Gelter, Fuchs, & Lexhagen, 2022a), explains that it has found better developments in STD technology than others.…”

“…STD is suitable for approaches in the Covid-19 era, because STD knows how tourism, visiting tourists, and communication technology make it easier for tourists. According to (García-milon et al, 2020;Gelter, Fuchs, & Lexhagen, 2022b;Mandi & Kennell, 2021b). STD is able to identify available resources to create effective and efficient tourism in the new normal era such as accommodation and facilities and enable to adopt governance system with participatory governance as required at each step tourists take in created tourist very comfort (Borghys, 2020).…”

Deep LSTM Network for Word-of-Mouth Management of Rural Tourism

“…Di erent regions of rural tourism with a characteristic cultural background need to have a reasonable management model. From the deep level of the local cultural background, a reasonable strategic plan for rural tourism is formulated, together with computer-aided technology, to form a closed-loop system for rural tourism management [3][4][5].…”