Smart and Sustainable Tourism Destinations

Abstract

Policymakers and business practitioners increasingly recognize the importance of sustainability in the development of smart tourism destinations, which require clear directions and specific guidelines. The authors used the Bibliometrix R-package and VOS Viewer software to perform a bibliometric analysis of 59 articles between 1900-2020 retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database. They compiled a bibliographic coupling, identified the key authors, journals, documents, and the most relevant universities. The findings detail four clusters: (1) smart tourism, (2) sustainable tourism, (3) technology, and (4) smart specialization. This work contributes to a better understanding of the concepts and aspires to provide useful information for those academics and destination marketing organizations (DMOs) attempting to analyze and deepen their knowledge within this research field. Simultaneously, it also aims to provide insights concerning the future development of sustainability and smart tourism in the social sciences' academic literature.