Destination Resilience and Smart Tourism Destinations

Abstract

Destinations around the world are rolling out smart tourism initiatives to increase their competitiveness and to support their sustainability goals. However, whether smart tourism development can also help them build resilience is a question that currently lacks an answer. This article links the two concepts of smart destinations and destination resilience at the conceptual level and presents a five-pillar framework of smart destination resilience. Specifically, it suggests smart tourism infrastructure and governance equip smart destinations with sensing, opening, sharing, governing, and innovating capacities that can enhance destination resilience by supporting six specific resilience conditions. As such, the article provides the necessary theoretical building blocks to support empirical research at the intersection of smart tourism and destination resilience. It further provides practical insights on how to ensure that smart destination development leads to greater resilience but also warns of the need to scope out potential vulnerabilities inherent in smart destination design.