Smart cities and tourism: co-creating experiences, challenges and opportunities

Citation

Loi, K.I. (2024), "Smart cities and tourism: co-creating experiences, challenges and opportunities", International Journal of Tourism Cities, Vol. 10 No. 3, pp. 1169-1171. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJTC-08-2024-301

The development and commercialisation of the internet and thereafter the information and communications technology (ICT) have enabled not only new business models but also augmented the tourism sector. In particular, the advancement in technology has dramatically changed the habitat of tourism, the way people travel and their behaviour in a tourism destination. As such, the concept of “smart city” and “smart tourism” has become an ideal “marriage” affording both challenges and co-creation opportunities (the “what”) to be faced by various stakeholders (the “who”) and the tourism destinations (the “where”). This book is a timely and comprehensive collage of key issues related to the impact of this urban evolution in tourism, with a special focus on the smart implications. Therefore, it is a valuable reference resource for people with all backgrounds interested in the topics, from tourism sector practitioners to destination management organisations (DMOs); from students, scholars to researchers. In fact, since this book adopts a multi-disciplinary approach and takes angles from different cities worldwide, it is indeed accurate to say that it can be an interesting and useful read for anyone.

The authors take the audience through a journey from a broader understanding of this familiar yet complicated topic to contextual implications and experience-sharing via carefully selected case studies. The book is organised around the three Ws (What, Who, Where) in 12 distinct chapters, each with an important role to play.

What: part 1 concepts and issues

The notion of “smart” has been around for more than a decade and has attracted much attention ever since. Everyone has heard about “smart”; most of them want to be “smart”, while many think they are being “smart”; but probably not all (if any) know exactly what “smart” in this era refers to, especially in the multi-disciplinary tourism city context. To this end, Chapter 1 provides the theoretical basis for setting the soft boundary of the concept of a smart city and explains what makes modern cities “smart”. This answers the question that many people ask or clarifies the misunderstanding that many may have and proposes a conceptual framework to explain the implementation process.

Chapter 2 lays out several major technological trends prevailing in tourism and hospitality, including the Internet of Things, biometric recognition technology, virtual and augmented reality, robotics, blockchain, among others, each illustrated with examples for easy understanding. All these contribute to the big data that is instrumental to the effectiveness of policies and regulations in tourism nowadays. This chapter also provides a handy table with the advantages and challenges of these innovative trends in tourism and hospitality, which is a big plus for readers.

Chapter 3 walks the readers through the time tunnel with the evolution of smart cities, which the authors name it “from smart city 1.0 to smart city 3.0”. The in-road of the evolution starts from the pure use of ICTs to collect data by the policymakers and service providers (1.0) to involving more people to apply ICT in their daily lives (2.0) to eventually promoting general citizens’ engagement with continuous interaction to co-create benefits via ICTs (3.0). The chapter presents from a fresh angle by using Scopus search results on variation concepts of smart cities and makes comparisons across different aspects over the three stages.

Chapter 4 takes a 180-degree turn to look at a niche yet highly relevant context – smart sports – with a focus on three main actor categories; namely, sport environment user, team player/athlete and sports fan/spectator/follower. Sport is truly inter-disciplinary in nature. For some it is an entertainment or leisure; for some it is a career/profession; for others it is for health and wellness. Regardless of its nature, people often cross boundaries because of sports (hence tourism). Nevertheless, not much attention has been devoted to the roles of urban sports in smart cities and the development of strategies connecting them. This chapter thus fills this void.

Who: part 2 smart tourism and smart tourists

No development or planning can be deemed successful and sustainable without the consideration of the people, in particular the users (i.e. tourists in this regard). Part 2 looks at smart tourism and its inter-connectivity with the public sector (public governance) and tourists (co-creation).

Chapter 5 discusses the approaches that city governments use to capitalise on the evolving technologies, their effective deployment and smart destination projects. Best practices and instruments in digital transformation (as well as the value co-created alongside the process) are identified as a result.

The notion of tourists as “temporary citizens” and how their behaviours have been re-shaped by the widespread adoption of ICT are the highlights of Chapter 6. The three experience phases of pre-, during and post-trip and the associated tourist behaviours are discussed in great detail. How smart cities make use of information infrastructure appealing to the smart tourist, who is increasingly demanding with high expectations, is an important lesson to learn for scholars and practitioners.

There are positive (co-created) or negative (co-destructed) outcomes from the (in)appropriate application of smart infrastructure to personalise tourist experiences. Personalisation is a complex strategy and does not always yield the expected results as it requires the right resources with appropriate implementation. Chapter 7 proposes a framework that describes the conditions and processes which may lead to these two ends.

Where: part 3 smart cities and smart tourism destinations

After taking in the important theoretical frameworks and ideas of smart cities and smart tourism from the previous two parts, this final part of the book provides real case studies of smart cities and smart tourism destinations to link theories with practice, thereby creating bridges between academia and industry.

Chapter 8 uses collaboration and interoperability between and among stakeholders as the centre of discussion and explains it through the lens of Europe’s Capital of Smart Tourism – Ljubljana, Slovenia. It investigates the social, political and technological processes as the main driving factors of smartness at the destination level.

Smart city governance often receives less academic attention than it deserves, albeit the fact that it is central to the success of any smart city processes. Chapter 9 is dedicated to discussing smart city governance, its definition, role, features and relevance. In particular, the chapter uses the case of Milan, Italy with its longitudinal perspectives on smart tourism metagovernance. The evidence spans across 15 years and the insights are invaluable to DMOs who are interested in enhancing the competitiveness and smartness of their destinations.

Chapter 12 selects four mostly visited European smart cities (Amsterdam, Barcelona, London and Vienna) to understand the differences and similarities in terms of degree of smartness and competitiveness among them. The results are illustrated following the 6 As Model (attractions, accessibility, amenities, available packages, activities and ancillary) proposed by Buhalis and Amaranggana in 2013.

The book is thoughtful in the selection of cases by ensuring variety for comprehensiveness’ sake. The previously mentioned chapters showcase six landlocked European cities while Chapter 10 takes the perspective of an insular geographical island, Madeira, Portugal and Chapter 11 uses Barranco, a coastal district in Lima, Peru, as the contextual background. The former explains the challenges in building infrastructure and the degree of implementation, while the latter demonstrates how smartness can be used as a means to enhance residents’ quality of life.

Reflection and suggestions

As rightly pointed out in the Introduction of the book, it attempts to provide “a comprehensive insight into the current issues and opportunities on smart cities and smart tourism in the next generation of urban evolution”. As such, the Editors have undoubtedly done an excellent job in curating chapters which can deliver this promise. Besides Part 3 which is dedicated to specific cases, some other chapters in the book also include useful cases to assist discussion. For instance, the authors demonstrate how ICT-based e-government has been implemented in Dubai and the lessons learned from this. Chapter 5 uses a government project in Spain as case study to demonstrate the relevance of knowledge and innovation agents in tourism systems to support destinations and help overcome their challenges. On the theory side, the reviewer appreciates the effort of many authors who try to use visual summaries to highlight the main ideas of their propositions or conceptual frameworks. The entire book is punctuated with tables, timelines, charts, figures, diagrams and the like, all with the objective of illustrating complicated concepts in a more digestible manner. Therefore, this book carries a delicate balance between theories and linkages to actual implementation, which suits the preferences and needs of parties with diverse backgrounds.

If one suggestion can be made, all major cases presented and minor examples used in the book are mostly set in the “Western” context. Nevertheless, Asia is a key player in tourism cities and many are keen to incorporate smart initiatives. We look forward to the version 2.0 of this book to include a larger Asian representation, along with cases from Africa, Australasia and MENA.