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The purpose of this paper is to describe a smart city initiative presenting a mobile tourist guide developed for Natal, Brazil.

This study has employed an exploratory case study approach to gain more knowledge about a smart city initiative and a mobile tourist guide in Brazil. The city of Natal was selected for this case study since it was one of the host cities during the FIFA World Cup 2014. The collected data for this research came from government (e.g. Natal Smart City plan), academic sources (e.g. Metropole Digital Institute (IMD)), and tourists’ information from the mobile tourist guide application.

The smart city initiative of Natal, and the mobile tourist guide (named Find Natal) responsible for collecting, processing, sharing, storing and analysing the tourist behaviour were detailed in the paper. The Smart City Consortium in Natal is developing an interoperable and distributed infrastructure that is advancing the state-of-the-art in information and communication technologies (ICT) for planning and managing smart cities. The IMD implemented an application, which aims to enhance the traveller’s experience through software programs designed to leverage the infrastructure mechanisms behind the city. The data gathered by the application was analysed to show how it was used during the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

The results show a developed ICT initiative in a Latin American country. This study offers a starting point for destinations willing to implement and deploy a smart city initiative.

The behavior of tourists strongly depends on the availability and quality of information. Too little information as well as too much can be disorienting and forces many tourists to join the majority visiting major sights. This causes a few crowded places in contrast to many which are under‐utilized. A Destination Management Organization has the goal to spread tourists more evenly, whereas the tourists would like to enjoy the destination to its full potential according to their personal interests. The paper aims to focus on the issues surrounding the creation of a mobile tourist guide.

A field trial was conducted in the summer of 2005 to study the following questions as a precondition for the development: Is it possible to seed generic interest profiles in the mobile context that allow the accurate prediction of actual rankings? Are the interest profiles sufficiently diverse to base personalized tours on individual interest profiles instead of interest prototypes? How do personalized tours affect the spatial behavior of tourist? Three methods to elicit the generic preferences of tourist in the mobile context are compared with actual rankings using Spearman's rank order coefficient.

The diversity of the interest profiles is analyzed in various ways leading to the conclusion that personalized interest profiles are necessary. For the gathered profiles tours are computed and simulated in order to gain a first insight into the effect on the spatial behavior of tourists.

The dynamic tour guide is supporting both goals by means of pervasive computing based on the actual context which is defined by personal interests, location and schedule of a tourist. It enables a personalized, spontaneous and guided tour.

This paper aims to examine and identify important attributes for mobile applications (apps) that might dictate tourist preferences for the apps on a small island destination. Guided by the Task Technology Fit (TTF) theory, the study considers the tasks performed, technology characteristics and individuals’ characteristics in determining the mobile apps attribute set.

This study uses a conjoint methodology within a case study approach framework. The conjoint analysis allows for assessing preferences from different consumers regarding the objective characteristics of products or services that facilitate the optimal design of product development. Optimal product development is a challenge for destinations, as they strive to achieve and sustain optimal market positions. Mobile apps may empower destinations in this endeavor. The case study approach imparts a context-dependent knowledge that facilitates a more nuanced understanding of consumer preference of use.

The results of the conjoint analysis suggest a strategic mapping of the most important attributes including type of content information, coupons and location awareness in defining apps product development. Within each attribute, the study also identifies the significant characteristics of a mobile application that are preferred by tourists. This ranking exists irrespective of familiarity with the destination (first-time and repeat visitors).

The implication is that revealed preferences anchored in conjoint analysis provide a powerful approach to optimize product development in a small island destination. From a practical perspective, the findings suggest that the developments of a mobile app for a destination must concentrate on fostering spending and consider the app as a new marketing channel. From a theoretical point of view, the current study highlights the usefulness of using the conjoint analysis and the TTF theory as an overarching framework in mapping a multi-attribute decision-making space that influences tourist judgment and preference of use. The conjoint method applied in the study enables researchers to clearly identify a combination of various mobile app attributes that are most influential on tourists’ choice and preference of use. The guiding framework, TTF theory, allows the conjoint product designs to go beyond the technology characteristics to include tasks performed by tourists and their individual characteristics.

This study is the first to apply a conjoint analysis within the TTF theoretical framework in the context of a small island destination when assessing tourists’ use preferences toward mobile applications, while at the same time investigating whether any differences exist between first-time and repeat visitors. The study demonstrates that complementing the nature of the task (traveling) with context-specific interface and interactive features is an important area of inquiry that can benefit from adopting conjoint analysis.

Manufacturers of smartphone devices are increasingly utilising a diverse range of sensors. This innovation has enabled developers to accurately determine a user’s current context. One area that has been significantly enhanced by the increased use of context in mobile applications is tourism. Traditionally, tour guide applications rely heavily on location and essentially ignore other types of context. This has led to problems of inappropriate suggestions and tourists experiencing information overload. These problems can be mitigated if appropriate personalisation and content filtering is performed. This research proposes an intelligent context-aware recommender system that aims to minimise the highlighted problems.

Intelligent reasoning was performed to determine the weight or importance of different types of environmental and temporal context. Environmental context such as the weather outside can have an impact on the suitability of tourist attractions. Temporal context can be the time of day or season; this is particularly important in tourism as it is largely a seasonal activity. Social context such as social media can potentially provide an indication of the “mood” of an attraction. These types of contexts are combined with location data and the context of the user to provide a more effective recommendation to tourists. The evaluation of the system is a user study that utilised both qualitative and quantitative methods, involving 40 participants of differing gender, age group, number of children and marital status.

This study revealed that the participants selected the context-based recommendation at a significantly higher level than either location-based recommendation or random recommendation. It was clear from analysing the questionnaire results that location is not the only influencing factor when deciding on a tourist attraction to visit.

To effectively determine the success of the recommender system, various combinations of contextual conditions were simulated. Simulating contexts provided the ability to randomly assign different contextual conditions to ensure an effective recommendation under all circumstances. This is not a reflection of the “real world”, because in a “real world” field study the majority of the contextual conditions will be similar. For example, if a tourist visited numerous attractions in one day, then it is likely that the weather conditions would be the same for the majority of the day, especially in the summer season.

Utilising this type of recommender system would allow the tourists to “go their own way” rather than following a prescribed route. By using this system, tourists can co-create their own experience using both social media and mobile technology. This increases the need to retain user preferences and have it available for multiple destinations. The application will be able to learn further through multiple trips, and as a result, the personalisation aspect will be incrementally refined over time. This extensible aspect is increasingly important as personalisation is gradually more effective as more data is collated.

This paper contributes to the body of knowledge that currently exists regarding the study of utilising contextual conditions in mobile recommender systems. The novelty of the system proposed by this research is the combination of various types of temporal, environmental and personal context data to inform a recommendation in an extensible tourism application. Also, performing sentiment analysis on social media data has not previously been integrated into a tourist recommender system. The evaluation concludes that this research provides clear evidence for the benefits of combining social media data with environmental and temporal context to provide an effective recommendation.

Tourist guides, one of the important service providers of tourism, have effected greatly by smart tourism technology during the COVID-19 period. It is thought that this trend will continue to increase in the future. Also, there are some challenges of smart tourism post pandemic on tour guides. In this context, the study aims to examine the levels of utilization of smart tourism applications by tourist guides, their activities in the COVID-19 period, and the transformation that tour guiding will undergo in the future. Within the scope of the study, existing smart tourism applications used in tours were examined with opportunities and challenges sides. In addition, the reflection of the guided cultural tours in the future was evaluated.

The purpose of this paper is to understand tourists' acceptance of innovative information technologies by examining the factors influencing the intention to use mobile electronic tourist guides (METG).

This paper developed and tested a model for examining tourists' acceptance of METG based upon Davis' technology acceptance model (TAM). The model considered three antecedents of intention: knowledge, usefulness and attitude. The relationships between them and between these and intention were explored using structural equation modeling.

The findings revealed that tourists' behavioural intentions towards using METG could be raised through attitude by ensuring greater levels of perceived usefulness. Usefulness, in turn, is highly influenced by the tourists' level of knowledge regarding METG. In addition, there was also a direct significant path between knowledge and behavioural intention, suggesting that good levels of knowledge of the technology are a pre‐condition for greater usage of METG.

This paper suggests that the predictive ability of the TAM in the context of innovations at their early stages of diffusion, that is, when potential adopters know little about them, can be enhanced by incorporating knowledge as an explanatory variable. Future studies could use the full version of the TAM by including other measures of knowledge beyond awareness knowledge, such as how‐to knowledge, as suggested by Rogers.

This paper adapts the TAM to study the acceptance of technology‐based information technologies at their early stages of development. The findings of this study contribute to enhancing our understanding of what influences tourists' acceptance of METG. They can be used to inform local and national strategies aimed at developing Portugal's (and other countries') credentials as digital destinations.

Rapid development of IT and communication technologies resulted in the “Smart” concept, which of late has become quite popular. The smart concept signifies the integration of organizational networks and smart features that enrich the ecosystem, facilitate daily activities for all stakeholders, and for automatization. Smart concept was discussed as a complicated technological infrastructure in urban areas intended to promote economic, social and environmental welfare. The latest technological developments gave rise to the concepts of smart planet, smart city and smart destination that have become important in recent years. Technological innovations have had a big influence on the development of the tourism industry. Smart concept is conceptualized as smart tourism for tourism sector. Smart Tourism generally has a positive effect on the rapid change of information and technology and on the tourism sector, tourism activities and increase in customer satisfaction. In this chapter, the concept of Smart and its smart technologies are explained and information about its reflections on the tourism sector and smart tourism destinations are discussed.

The growth of online data and services on the Web have have led to the Web become an indispensable tool for the tourist industry. It is not denied that various approaches bring benefits for visitors, in supporting their searching for tourist attractions, such as interesting places for the visit, eating or staying. However, like a coin has two sides, too much information would present a difficulty for people when planning their journeys. Generally, tourists usually have problems when trying to find satisfactory accommodation if references to nearby restaurants, sights or event locations are lacking. In addition, travelers suffer from the information overload when they look for information about potential destinations, events and related services. Providing relevant and up‐to‐date information for the tourists with different personal interests is still a challenging task for the tourist guide information systems. The purpose of this paper is to propose a semantic approach for searching tourist information and generating travel itinerary.

The paper focus on introducing an ontological model for representation of tourist resources as well as traveler's profile. Based on this model, smart user interfaces facilitating the semantic search have been implemented in the mobile travel guide application. In addition, the authors propose an algorithm for generating travel itinerary which combines semantic matching with ant colony optimization technique.

The Semantic Tourist informAtion Access and Recommending (STAAR) system, which has been implemented to promote the travel activity in Hanoi, reveals the advantages of the semantic approach in the development of smart application with ontology‐based, user‐friendly interface and high precision information search features. An experiment was conducted to show that the proposed algorithm generates travel itinerary relevant to both criteria of itinerary length and user interest.

This paper presents a novel algorithm for planning a travel itinerary that is optimized on the length as well as semantically matching the user interests.

Mobile travel apps (MTA) smart features were identified based on recent travel application (app) trends and a literature review of MTA smart features. Subsequently, the MTA features that could be prioritised to increase user interest in MTA were determined. The MTA smart feature development challenges that should be mitigated were also identified.

The app identification and selection were based on the one-stop solution characteristics containing the common function of travel apps and eight MTA smart features. A total of 193 Apple apps and 250 Google apps were identified, where 36 apps that met the inclusion and exclusion criteria based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses flowchart were selected for evaluation.

The high user ratings for apps from both app stores revealed the acceptance of smart technology in the tourism industry. Geolocation tracking services, travel itinerary generators, and real-time personalisation and recommendation were the three major features available in the included MTA. The challenges of MTA with smart features were highlighted from the tourism organisation, app developer and user perspectives.

The findings can guide tourism organisations and app developers on the smart features that MTA should offer for user engagement. Technological organisations could optimise their technology stack by considering the identified smart features. The findings are valuable for scholars in terms of MTA aesthetics and usability to gain acceptability. The development challenges included significant investment in technology, location accuracy and privacy concerns when implementing MTA smart features.

The previous literature mainly focused on evaluating app quality, assessing app functionality, and user ratings using the Mobile Application Rating Scale, and scoping reviews of MTA articles. Contrastingly, this study is among the first in which MTA smart features were examined from a developer-centric perspective. Moreover, it is suggested that MTA includes integrated smart features for better tourism services and market penetration in the tourism industry.

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the increasing importance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in smart tourism destinations, in their integration in the activity of the tourism companies, and in their interaction with visitors/tourists. In summary, it is intended to evaluate in the city of Porto how the use of technology before, during and after the visit influences the tourist experience.

The authors empirically investigate the importance of using ICTs during tourism experience, assess the access/availability of ICT at the destination and its importance in tourist’s decisions. It is analyzed if the applications and/or information available on the internet are important and positively influence the tourism experience in Porto, that is, the degree of tourist satisfaction. The empirical evidence is based on a quantitative analysis, using a data set involving 423 tourists in the city of Porto.

The importance of the internet access at the destination, especially in places like airports and hotels, since most tourists are primarily using their mobile devices and computers during the trip, and the existing information technologies available in the destination (internet, smartphones or other mobile devices and applications) are considered very important in explaining tourists’ experience.

This study identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the technological strategies, providing useful information for destination management, discussing innovation in tourism, and proposing a framework that empirically evaluates how technological components used in smart tourism destinations can improve tourists’ experiences.