Sustainable tourism indicators: what’s new within the smart city/destination approach?

Abstract

Indicators are a fundamental tool for destinations in their progress towards a more sustainable tourism development. However, the lack of real progress and the accelerated technological change are obliging policy makers to rethink the existing indicator systems. This paper examines the relationship between smart cities and destinations and sustainable tourism indicators by analyzing proposals at different scales. It provides a critical review of international smart city standards and the role that sustainability indicators play within them. Then, it conducts a content analysis of planning instruments applied in smart strategies in Spain, focusing on how sustainability indicators are considered under the smart paradigm. At the regional-local scale, this research compares two sets of indicators and tests the scientific validity of one of them for addressing the imbalance suffered by many indicators between their usefulness for policy makers and their academic rigor. The results show that little progress has been achieved despite the appropriation of the sustainability discourse by smart city and smart destination promoters. These findings reveal the (limited) real contribution made by smart cities/destinations to sustainable tourism development and contribute to identifying weaknesses and opportunities so as to redirect smart policies and projects. A final discussion contextualizes the findings within the novel framework of smart sustainability and highlights the need to reinforce public governance of urban and tourist spaces.

Evidence-informed Planning for Tourism

“…To help guarantee tourism's long-term sustainability, there is a need for the continued monitoring of its impacts at destination level (Ivars-Baidal et al, 2021;Rio & Nunes, 2012). As noted by both Cernat and Gourdon (2012) and Mason (2016), studies assessing tourism activities often deal with the relationship between tourism and foreign exchange earnings, generation of income, employment, and regional and local development (Pratt & Alizadeh, 2018).…”

How Does Sustainable Rural Tourism Cause Rural Community Development?

“…The International Council on Monuments and Sites has stated that sustainable tourism refers to a level of tourism activity that can be maintained over the long-term, which results in a net benefit for the social, economic, natural, and cultural environments of the area in which it takes place. Based on this statement, Ivars-Baidal et al [62] and Lee et al [63] used the economic benefits brought by tourism and the number of local tourists as two important indicators to measure sustainable tourism. As an analogy, in this paper, we use the economic benefits brought by rural tourism to rural areas and the number of rural tourists as two indicators to measure rural sustainable tourism.…”

Conceptualizing the Smart Tourism Mindset: Fostering Utopian Thinking in Smart Tourism Development

“…The Smart Tourism Mindset therefore refers to the way smart tourism is conceptualized and implemented at a destination, with a particular focus on the values that inform and shape these processes. It significantly departs from approaches that describe smart tourism by outcomes, such as the kind of soft and hard infrastructure needed (Boes, Buhalis, & Inversini, 2016), and evaluate its achievement using infrastructure and development indicators (Foronda-Robles, Galindo-Pérez-de-Azpillaga, & Fernández-Tabales, 2020;Huertas, Moreno, & My, 2019;Ivars-Baidal, Vera-Rebollo et al, 2021) or measures related to competitiveness (Chung, Lee, Ham, & Koo, 2021). Such a departure from inputs and outcomes to values and process is also important from a communication perspective, as smart tourism narratives play an important role in influencing smart tourism discourse and steering the implementation of smart tourism in research and practice (Gelter et al, 2020).…”