Smart tourism: foundations and developments

Abstract

Smart tourism is a new buzzword applied to describe the increasing reliance of tourism destinations, their industries and their tourists on emerging forms of ICT that allow for massive amounts of data to be transformed into value propositions. However, it remains ill-defined as a concept, which hinders its theoretical development. The paper defines smart tourism, sheds light on current smart tourism trends, and then lays out its technological and business foundations. This is followed by a brief discussion on the prospects and drawbacks of smart tourism. The paper further draws attention to the great need for research to inform smart tourism development and management.

Digital Omotenashi: Toward a Smart Tourism Design Systems

“…The scholars argued that the future eTourism systems should deal with the various motivations and desires of tourists [1]. In more recent studies, tourism communities also suggested using IS for creating smart experience, connecting ICT with tourism experience [3], and improving the experience of tourists as well as the competitiveness of tourism organizations [14]. However, only few studies have deeply discussed these issues.…”

“…For instance, most studies argued the adaptation, connection, and utilization of technology per se or the relevant infrastructures (i.e., internet, smart city infrastructures, etc.) [3,6,31] or rationalized using information for organizations or increasing destination competitiveness (i.e., efficiency, cost management, etc.) [3,32].…”

“…Since the early eTourism studies [1], Information Systems (IS) have contributed in rationalizing tourism information and tourists' behaviors-through websites that enable reservation and price comparisons (e.g., Expedia and Booking) and websites that provide information, reviews and recommendations (e.g., Tripadvisor and WikiTravel). Recently, smart tourism studies have attracted the interest of many scholars [2,3], and they have addressed the importance of big data-driven approaches for user-friendly, customized, and intelligent tourism systems [4,5]. By highlighting the role of IS as a tool for supporting tourists during their travels, smart tourism studies have the potential to make many achievements, particularly in promoting travel planning systems, or what we are calling "Proactive Tourism Systems".…”

“…More recently, there has been a paradigm shift in tourism towards more user-friendly intelligent systems based on big data analysis, or what can be called "smart tourism" [2,3,15]. In the literature, scholars have discussed the concept of smart tourism systems; it can be seen that this concept is still broad and fuzzy, but primarily discussed in the scope of: (1) mutual interconnection and synchronization between technology and systems; (2) customized systems based on intelligent analysis of big data; (3) integration of tourist's experience with physical and digital environment; and (4) facilitating tourism ecosystems by means of information sharing.…”

Calp, hacia la sostenibilidad a través de la inteligencia

“…Existen así diferentes prismas -el plano territorial, la perspectiva de la gestión pública, la visión de los agentes privados, etc. -desde los que los destinos turísticos pueden ser conceptualizados (Ivars, Solsona, & Giner, 2016) A pesar del estado primigenio del concepto, el mismo ha sido recibido con mucho interés en varios países, siendo España uno de los más relevantes (Gretzel, Sigala, et al, 2015). El principal apoyo ha venido de instituciones como AENOR y SEGITTUR que define a los destinos turísticos inteligentes como «un espacio turístico innovador, accesible para todos, consolidado sobre una infraestructura tecnológica de vanguardia que garantiza el desarrollo sostenible del territorio, facilita la interacción e integración del visitante con el entorno e incrementa la calidad de su experiencia en el destino y la calidad de vida de los residentes» (SEGITTUR, 2015: 32).…”