Toward a consensual definition for smart tourism and smart tourism tools

Abstract

Smart tourism (ST) stems from the concepts of e-tourism - focused on the digitalization of processes within the tourism industry, and digital tourism – also considering the digitalization within the tourist experience. The earlier ST references found regard ST Destinations and emerge from the development of Smart Cities.

Our initial literature review on the ST concept and Smart Tourism Tools (STT) revealed significant research uncertainties: ST is poorly defined and frequently linked to the concept of Smart Cities; different authors have different, sometimes contradictory, views on the goals of ST; STT claims are often only based on technological aspects, and their “smartness” is difficult to evaluate; often the term “Smart” describes developments fueled by cutting-edge technologies, which lose that status after a few years.

This chapter is scoped in the ongoing initiative of building an online observatory to provide a broad view of STTs' offerings in Europe. Such an observatory requires methodologies and tools to evaluate “smartness” based on a sound definition of ST and STT and being able to cope with technological evolution. We describe herein the results of a participatory approach where we invited ST experts worldwide in our effort to reach that soundness.