Smart Tourism City: Developments and Transformations

Abstract

Cities and tourism entities invest massive resources into smart system initiatives as information technologies are a key factor for a city’s destination competitiveness. Moreover cities around the world are increasingly recognizing the smart tourism city concept and related strategies as means of optimizing sustainable environments. Particularly for cities facing emerging issues of residents’ negative perceptions towards tourism, smart tourism city empowers a city to rise to this challenge by creating urban spaces that residents and visitors can enjoy together. However, smart tourism city research initiatives still fail to address the full spectrum of related and potential developments. This study presents a conceptual approach to defining smart tourism city: the smart city and its components are defined and contrasted with smart tourism and its components. The resulting convergence—smart tourism city—is then examined in light of a number of pioneering examples of smart tourism cities and its vital roles in the age of sustainable development. The main purpose of this study is to show the interests of locals and tourists context and the roles of ‘smart’ government leadership to researchers and practitioners.