Search results

This study aims to describe the concept of smart tourism, placing emphasis on the smart tourism ecosystem and value co-creation concept within the system at a destination level. The work also summarizes the key challenges associated with smart tourism implementation and development.

The study was conducted as a critical literature review, discussing the outcomes of a wide range and scope of relevant academic literature on the chosen concepts.

Smart tourism can be described as the use of information and communication technology (ICT) technologies to facilitate and enrich tourism products, services and experiences. Within the smart tourism ecosystem, all stakeholders – customers, suppliers, intermediates, the public sector, service providers, destination management organizations and others –participate in the synergies and value co-creation, also share the benefits from it. The ultimate aim of a smart tourism ecosystem is to create sustainable economic, social and environmental benefits for all and promote destination competitiveness. Smart tourism implementation is also associated with several challenges, of which the most important are participation, an overwhelming amount of data, data privacy and technology adoption.

The paper provides a critical review of the recent and relevant literature in order to define and discuss the mechanisms of value co-creation in a smart tourism ecosystem and the challenges associated with it.

This study aims to provide a summary of the key outcomes and reflections related to the theme issue question, “Smart tourism: what developments and issues are important to the Baltic states?”

This study utilizes a descriptive approach to summarize the key outcomes of the theme issue. The theme issue focuses on the problems, trends and developments of smart tourism in the Baltic states, namely, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

The papers in the theme issue explore the emerging concept of smart tourism and the challenges associated with its implementation at the destination level. They also provide updated data on the adoption of smart tourism and aim to engage academics and industry professionals to identify future developments.

This theme issue provides unique perspectives from a variety of stakeholders, including academics, practitioners, industry professionals and policymakers on the key issues, trends and developments shaping the emergence of smart tourism in the Baltic states.

Provides an overview of the article collection in this theme issue that explores the concept of “smart tourism” and in particular, developments and issues that are important for the Baltic States.

The article applies a thematic approach to exploring the factors affecting the development of smart tourism, as well as the challenges and opportunities facing the Baltic region. Overall, the collection reviews the literature, provides an analysis of data and a survey of experts, including tourism service providers. This combines with the practical solutions given in the articles.

The findings and conclusions of this theme issue focus on the factors affecting the development of smart tourism and smart villages, digitalization and innovation opportunities in the Baltic regions, and it provides an insight on the current situation in the smart tourism industry, the possibilities for using digital technologies, and the practical applications.

This theme issue explores the factors influencing and challenges facing smart tourism in the Baltic region, given that all the stakeholders actively want more sustainable and balanced tourism, as well as opportunities to develop innovative, technologically advanced solutions to the development of smart tourism.

This study assesses the impact of smart destination implementations in Malaga. Thus, this study aims to guide the transformation of destinations into smart destinations as well as the introduction of smart destination concept in the literature.

Malaga was selected because it was one of the two winners of 2020 European Capital of Smart Tourism competition as well as the winner in the accessibility category of the 2019. The research population lives in Malaga and has been professionally involved in smart destination implementations. Data were collected through a semi-structured interview of 14 smart-tourism experts in different career fields. Content analysis was applied to the findings.

Malaga has become a successful smart destination while it has had a great success in improving its attractiveness and competitiveness due to the developments in the past 20 years. Now, its citizens and tourists are very satisfied and have a higher and more attractive quality of life. Moreover, Malaga has become a leading destination, especially in accessibility and mobility.

Although smart destination is becoming popular topic day by day, almost all the studies are created to introduce the approach with secondary data. There are still only limited research studies conducted by primary data on a real smart destination case. Furthermore, Malaga is a quite good example to understand the importance of smart destination approach since the city has achieved to become an attractive and popular destination for both tourists and local residents.

This study aims to examine and analyse data relating to cultural heritage, smart tourism and smart tourism tools for preserving cultural heritage in the Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The paper is based on a qualitative review of data from National tourism board web sites, the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, and the European Heritage Label sites. The paper analyses various sources in terms of cultural heritage and smart tourism and examines different ways of applying smart tourism tools to cultural heritage.

The findings show that smart tourism, and especially the preservation of cultural heritage in the Baltic states, is not a new thing, and it is rapidly progressing by inventing new technological tools for tourists to use and as well by digitising cultural heritage. Comprehensive examination of three countries shows that there is significant potential already and that there is a way to grow further for each of the countries by applying new technological tools for preservation of a cultural heritage.

The paper reviews data on cultural heritage and smart tourism tools in the Baltic states where it already plays a steady and significant role. Specifically, it contributes to recognition of each of the states on a global level in terms of variety of cultural heritage that is being preserved and digitalised. The originality of the paper is determined by the assessment of the smart tools used for cultural tourism.

The concept of a smart city is becoming more closely linked to tourism destinations. The relationship between the environment, sustainability and tourism has become more interrelated. An eco-friendly city environment can influence tourists’ decisions, but tourist flows can also negatively impact the local ecosystem by increasing energy consumption, air pollution and environmental sustainability. In this research letter, the authors reverse this perspective, moving into smart city trajectories, highlighting that increasing tourism in cities drives the city to advance a green transition to respond to the imbalance generated by large flows of tourists that increase the users-density of the city. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the symbiotic relationship between increasing tourism in cities and the imperative for a green transition.

This study builds on the generalized method of moment approach and an 11-year panel data set covering 30 Italian cities to investigate the relationship between tourism flow and the cities’ green practices embedded in the smart environment dimension.

This study provides empirical evidence that a large flow of tourists in cities positively affects the cities’ green transition, contributing to the advancement of smart tourism and smart city debate.

The study focuses only on one country, and although its results may be generalizable to the European Union, it is not representative at a global level and requires further research.

This study offers practical implications underscoring the benefits of large tourism inflow in managing and implementing smart city projects.

Tourism and overtourism may lead to a city reaction regarding green practices, which can have a multiplier benefit on the urban environment.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first study attempt to investigate the tourism flow as a driver of smart city implementation, considering the city’s reaction to tourism and overtourism conditions in the city that would lead to the ecological and sustainable collapse of a city.

Building on new trends in tourism and smart city governance, this study aims to examine the degree of interrelation between stakeholder networks involved in tourism governance and smart city development. A model describing the transition towards smart tourism city governance is proposed.

The proposed model is tested through a multiple case study of seven European cities. This choice of sample makes the study highly representative. Data collection is based on an exhaustive search and analysis of available data on smart city initiatives, destination management organisations and tourism plans. Social network analysis using Gephi software is used to build stakeholder networks.

Analysis of the stakeholder networks that shape tourism governance and smart initiatives in several cities reveals a disconnection between the two types of networks. The results show limited progress towards the expected synergies of true smart tourism city governance.

Theoretically, the study contributes to the debate on new forms of governance for the complex evolution of urban tourism. In practice, the relationship between tourism governance and smart city initiatives needs to be redefined to achieve synergies that increase the inclusiveness and efficiency of urban tourism policies.

This study examines the under-researched topic of the interrelation between tourism governance and smart city initiatives. By comparing the networks of actors resulting from these two processes, it assesses the extent to which this interrelation helps the emergence of new governance models (smart tourism city governance).

Building on recent smart hospitality systematic reviews and extensive literature analyses, this paper aims to explore recent developments, themes and issues within smart hospitality. It synthesises existing knowledge, extrapolating forward and contributes to the future development of smart hospitality by serving as a reference to enrich academic/industry discussions and stimulate future research.

The research examined 8 recent review articles on smart hospitality and tourism and extracted 145 articles in peer-reviewed sources from Web of Science focussed on smart hospitality. These publications supported in-depth analysis to explore the body of knowledge and develop foresight for the future of smart hospitality within business ecosystems at tourism destinations. It synthesises knowledge and provides the basis for the development of a comprehensive in-depth research agenda in smart hospitality innovations as well as the formulation of agile hospitality ecosystems.

This paper illustrates that smart hospitality introduces disruptive innovations that affect the entire hospitality ecosystem. Smart hospitality takes advantage of smart cities and smart tourism towards establishing agile business ecosystems in networked destinations. Having reviewed the existing literature, the study developed a conceptual framework and introduced a comprehensive future research agenda. This includes the drivers of smart hospitality, namely, customer-centricity, personalisation, individualisation and contextualisation; marketing-driven hospitality excellence and metaverse; as well as operation agility, asset strategy, talent management and supplier interoperation. It also identified the foundations that provide the infostructure for smart hospitality, including ambient intelligence, big data, processes and sustainability, providing the capability blocks to co-create value for all stakeholders in the hospitality ecosystem.

This study conceptualises smart hospitality as a disruptive and innovative power that will affect the competitiveness of hospitality and tourism organisations as part of a comprehensive ecosystem. It identifies the key stakeholders and explores how they can take advantage of emerging developments. This paper proposes the drivers and foundation for future research on smart hospitality. The research provides a conceptual synthesis of the literature and the concepts that have been elaborated. The foundations are effectively the infostructure that enables the drivers to add value to different stakeholders. Key issues are identified to stimulate further research on the area to support smart hospitality development and adoption.

Although there has been a significant amount of research on Smart Tourism, the articles have not yet been combined into a thorough literature review that can examine research streams and the scope of future research. The purpose of this study is to examine the literature on the impact of deploying the Internet of Things (IoT) in tourism sector development to attract more visitors using a text mining technique and citation based bibliometric analysis for the first time.

This study uses R programming to do a full-text analysis of 36 publications on IoT in tourism and visualization of similarities viewer software to conduct a bibliometric citation analysis of 469 papers from the Scopus database. Aside from that, the documents were subjected to a longitudinal study using Excel and word frequency using a trending topic using the R-tool.

Results from the bibliometric study revealed the networks that exist in the literature of Tourism Management. With the use of log-likelihood, the findings from text mining identified nine theme models on the basis of relevancy, which is presented alongside an overview of the existing papers and a list of the primary authors with posterior probability using latent Dirichlet allocation.

This study examines tourism literature in which IoT plays a significant role. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to combine text mining with a bibliometric review. It significantly analyzes and discusses the impact of technology in the tourism sector development on attracting tourists while presenting the most important and frequently discussed topics and research in these writings. These findings provide researchers, tourism managers and technology professionals with a complete understanding of e-tourism and to provide smart devices to attract tourists.

Aunque ha habido un número importante de estudios sobre el turismo inteligente, todavía no se dispone de una revisión bibliográfica exhaustiva que permita examinar las corrientes de investigación y las sugerencias de investigación futuras. Este estudio examina la literatura sobre el impacto del Internet de las cosas en el desarrollo del sector turístico para atraer más visitantes utilizando una técnica de minería de textos y un análisis bibliométrico basado en citas.

Este estudio utiliza la programación R para hacer un análisis de texto completo de 36 publicaciones sobre IoT en el turismo y el software de visualización de similitudes (VOS) para realizar un análisis bibliométrico de citas de 469 documentos de la base de datos Scopus. Además, los documentos fueron sometidos a un estudio longitudinal mediante Excel y a la frecuencia de palabras mediante un tema de tendencia utilizando la herramienta R.

Los resultados del estudio bibliométrico revelaron las redes existentes en la literatura de la Gestión Turística. Con el uso de la log-verosimilitud, los resultados de la minería de textos identificaron nueve modelos temáticos sobre la base de la relevancia, que se presentan junto con una visión general de los documentos existentes y una lista de los autores principales con probabilidad posterior utilizando la asignación latente de dirichlets.

Este estudio examina la literatura sobre turismo en la que la IoT desempeña un papel importante. Este estudio es el primero que combina la minería de textos con una revisión bibliométrica. Analiza y discute de forma significativa el impacto de la tecnología en el desarrollo del sector turístico para atraer a los turistas, a la vez que presenta los temas e investigaciones más importantes y más frecuentemente discutidos en estos escritos. Estos resultados proporcionan a los investigadores, gestores turísticos y profesionales de la tecnología una comprensión integral del turismo electrónico y los dispositivos inteligentes para atraer a los turistas.

虽然已经有大量关于智慧旅游的研究, 但这些文章尚未整合成一个全面的文献综述, 可以检阅目前的研究流和未来研究的范畴。本研究首次使用文本挖掘技术和基于引文的文献计量分析, 来研究有关在旅游业发展中部署物联网对吸引更多游客的影响的文献。

本研究使用R编程对36篇关于旅游业物联网的文章进行全文分析, 并使用相似性可视化（VOS）查看器软件对Scopus数据库中的469篇论文进行文献计量引文分析。除此之外, 还利用Excel对这些文献进行了纵向研究, 并使用R工具对趋势主题进行了词频分析。

文献计量研究的结果揭示了旅游管理文献中现有的网络。通过使用对数似然, 文本挖掘的结果根据相关性确定了9个主题模型, 这些模型与现有论文的概述和主要作者名单在使用潜在狄里奇分配（LDA）的后验概率一起呈现。

本研究对旅游物联网相关文献进行了分析研究, 它首次将文本挖掘与文献计量学审查相结合。这项研究着重分析和讨论了技术在旅游行业发展中对吸引游客的影响, 同时介绍了这些文章中最重要和经常讨论的主题和研究。这些发现为研究人员、旅游管理者和技术专家提供了对科技与旅游的全面了解, 并提供关于智能设备来吸引游客的建议。

Smart tourism is a destination management approach that requires the buy-in of a myriad of stakeholders. Its many audiences and complexity demand the creation of meaningful brands to effectively position and communicate smart tourism initiatives. The purpose of this paper is to explore how smart tourism branding strategies have been implemented to communicate relevant values, benefits and attributes to industry stakeholders through institutional websites.

Based on a semiotic analysis of two smart tourism-related sites (destinosinteligentes.es and smarttourismcapital.eu), the research interprets the brand-related visual and verbal signs.

The findings highlight how brand elements embedded in websites communicate a brand identity and facilitate particular interpretations of smart tourism. Both brands use similar signs to promote a techtopian vision of smart destinations but employ different strategies to motivate stakeholder buy-in.

Smart tourism is currently largely embedded in overall smart city initiatives and finding tourism-specific examples online is difficult. However, the two selected websites reflect the brands of multiple destinations and permit a detailed analysis of meaning making. Future research can focus on how brand-related signs are perceived by different stakeholders.

Identifying the strategies and shortcomings of current smart tourism brands informs future smart tourism branding efforts and effective communication with smart tourism stakeholders.

Semiotics is a relevant but underutilized method to understand how smart tourism initiatives conceptualize “smartness.”