Smart tourism destinations: a critical reflection

Rodolfo Baggio Roberto Micera Giacomo Del Chiappa

Master in Economics and Tourism, Institute for Studies on the Department of Economics and
Bocconi University Mediterranean (ISMed) Business, University of Sassari
and National Research Council (CNR) and
Tomsk Polytechnic University School of Tourism & Hospitality,
roberto.micera@ismed.cnr.it University of Johannesburg,
rodolfo.baggio@unibocconi.it South Africa

gdelchiappa@uniss.it

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Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology (2020) doi: 10.1108/JHTT-01-2019-0011

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Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of the main literature contributions
that concern smart tourism development and management, highlighting gaps and logical
inconsistencies. In addition, to further stress the importance of the issues at stake, a
simulation is performed for showing how technology allows achieving better outcomes
when a certain level of efficiency is obtained via re-engineering of main organizational
and operational processes.
Design/methodology/approach
A content analysis of recent relevant literature is performed with the help of machine
learning topic modelling algorithms. A network analytic approach to digital ecosystems,
then, is used to study the relationship between technological tools and physical entities in
a destination and how these and their combination affect the efficiency of the system at a
local and global level.
Findings
The literature analyzed lacks a good discussion on the necessity to improve and rationalize the
operational and organizational processes while emphasizing mostly the technological aspects.
On the other hand, the simulation case presented show that if information and knowledge flows
are reasonably efficient and well organized in the physical world, the integration of digital
components further enhances these processes, while inefficiencies can hinder the flow of
information and reduce its efficiency.
Originality/value
Apart from the methods employed, relatively little explored, we show that, as also much
of the computer science literature states, a fundamental prerequisite for successful
‘smart’ projects is a logical and effective restructuring of the main operational and
organizational processes.

Keywords
smart tourism destination; literature survey; topic modeling; network analysis; knowledge
flows

1. Introduction

The wide diffusion and the evolution of digital technologies have profoundly changed all
aspects of our lives and have had an incredible impact on countless economic sectors, tourism
above all. The idea of ascribing ‘intelligence’ to the modern technologies has, recently, led to
the emergence of the concept of “smartness”. Although different disciplines provide many
definitions that recall the term ‘smart’, in practice a smart environment can be loosely thought
to be one in which a widespread use of ICTs allows all stakeholders to easily access knowledge
and information thus facilitating innovation of their activities and providing value to their users
or customers (see e.g., Kearns & Lederer, 2003; Zhou & Li, 2012).
In the last few years, these concepts have been applied to tourism destinations and the term
‘smart tourism destination’ has been coined (Boes et al., 2016; Buhalis & Amaranggana, 2014;
Del Chiappa & Baggio, 2015; Wang et al., 2013). A growing number of academic studies have
been attempting to analyze, also empirically, the technological and business foundations of this
concept. What appears to be quite evident is that it is actually very difficult to find or imagine
a tourism destination that can be considered totally smart. Further, the most part of existing
studies seems to suggest, at least implicitly, that wide and pervasive use of technology alone
might make it possible to consider the destination as being ‘smart’. Hence, it seems crucial to
deal with the smart-driven approach in destination management and marketing by devoting
relevant attention to everything that needs to be planned and implemented (e.g., a profound
revision of organizations, processes and practices, a change in the organizational culture, etc.)
to render this fascinating technology-driven business model real and effective.
Moving from these considerations, this study examines the ideas and the concepts that inform
smart tourism development and management and performs an analysis of recent literature
highlighting the gaps and the logical inconsistencies that still exist in current literature around
the concept; to this end a content analysis has been used. Then, a network analytic approach is
applied to three Italian tourism destinations: Elba Island in the Tuscany Region, Gallura in the
region of Sardinia and Livigno in the Italian Alps. The goal is to analyze the extent to which
the physical and digital components of the networked system of stakeholders co-exist, and how
the technological infrastructure can ease cooperation, knowledge sharing, open innovation and
co-creation. Specifically, the study aims to show the extent to which such combined systems
(i.e. smart tourism destinations) can attain a level of efficiency, higher than that achievable
considering the physical ‘hardware’ only. Further, it aims to empirically test the idea that the
integration of a digital network greatly improves the overall efficiency of the whole system just
when information and knowledge flows are reasonably efficient in the physical world, thus
making technology echo the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the physical world. In other
words, we aim at understanding whether merely injecting technology into the organizational
dynamics of a tourism destination is a sufficient condition for the destination to be smart. Based
on empirical findings, the paper also intends to shed light on the main conditions favoring the
transformational process of a tourism destination into a smart tourism destination. The
implications for destination and stakeholders’ managers are discussed and possible future
research avenues are sketched.

2. Theoretical Background

The scientific debate developed over the last five years on smart tourism destinations (STDs)
is rooted in the application mutatis mutandis of the concept of smart city and its main features
to the tourism domain (Ivars-Baidal et al., 2017). The concept of STD, in fact, is directly linked
to that of smart city, where sustainability is the main strategic aim of the tourism planning
process (Khan et al., 2017).
As claimed by Errichiello and Micera (2017), the Smart Tourism Destination concept is the
result of two converging trends: on the one hand the unstoppable spread of eTourism (Buhalis,
2003; Buhalis & Jun, 2011; Buhalis & Law, 2008), on the other hand the opportunities
generated by the adoption of the smart city paradigm to optimize the use of tourist resources,
enhance tourist experiences, increase the competitiveness of destinations and improve the
quality of life of residents (Buhalis & Amaranggana, 2014; Lopez de Avila, 2015).
At the same time, as underlined by Ivars-Baidal, Celdrán-Bernabeu, Mazón & Perles-Ivars
(2017), the theoretical debate was articulated in different geographical areas in relation to the
different development policies of smart tourism destinations.
In Asia, China and South Korea, tourism development policies are strongly oriented towards
smart development, through the massive financing of initiatives that can promote the creation
of a technological infrastructure for marketing and management of destinations and resources
(Gretzel et al., 2015a; Guo et al., 2014; Hwang et al., 2015; Li et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2013).
This has supported scientific studies focused on the technological tools essential to the creation
of a STD, in which the need for an evolution of the traditional Destination Management Systems
in Smart Tourism Systems was underlined: i.e. open technological architectures in which Cloud
Computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and the End-User Internet Service Systems coexist,
capable of favoring the exchange of knowledge among the stakeholders, increasing the
intelligence of the destination (Wang et al., 2013; Zhu et al., 2014). Here cloud services provide
remote access to multiple applications, software and data; the IoT provides services to optimize
the interaction among tour operators and users; finally, end user devices support users with
tools (equipments) and applications to access services related to tourism.
Obviously, these tools assume an enormous strategic relational value, as they become essential
to support the synergies between the actors of the tourism supply system, the decision-making
process of the DMO and new experience design (Fuchs et al., 2014; Gretzel, 2011; Gretzel et
al., 2015a; Hall & Williams, 2008; Ivars-Baidal et al., 2017; Schianetz et al., 2007).
In Europe, tourism policies associated with the spread of the smart city paradigm, are aimed
more at increasing innovation and competitiveness of destinations, by including thorough
relations with other sectors, as, for example, the Italian synergy between tourism and culture
(Errichiello & Micera, 2017). The seminal work of Buhalis and Amaranggana (2014) showed
that in order to increase the competitiveness of destinations it is necessary to connect
stakeholders dynamically, allowing that the instantaneous exchange of information and
accessibility is guaranteed from a variety of end user devices. The emphasis is mainly on the
so-called smart tourism experience, i.e. the opportunity to enhance the mediated tourism
experience of smart technologies. The connected tourist, interacts, participates and shares more
easily, increasing the co-creation level of the tourism product and adding new value for all (Del
Vecchio et al., 2018; Almobaideen, et al., 2017; Buonincontri & Micera, 2016; Cacho et al.,
2016; Neuhofer et al., 2012). Moreover, as Vargas-Sánchez (2016) argues, the intensive use of
technological infrastructure enhances the consumer perspective, improving the tourist
experience of visitors in terms of co-creation and customization, thus playing both the consumer
role and producer of data and information role.
Australian tourism policies paid more attention to issues concerning smart governance and the
use of open data. On the subject of governance, Funilkul and Chutimaskul (2009), with
reference to smart cities, had already focused their attention on the web as a tool for increasing
interaction among stakeholders, including tourists and residents, who in addition to being able
to collaborate and to exchange information and knowledge in an attempt to converge towards
a common vision. In this context, the DMO must encourage communication that can support a
supply design that is appropriate to the needs of consumers (Jovicic, 2019).
In order to design unique tourism experiences, it is essential that the DMO is able to use the
data collected to provide solutions that satisfy all stakeholders of the tourism system. This has
led to a knowledge management perspective as one of the main aspects of the processes of a
STD. The key features of an intelligent tourism destination, as Khan, Woo, Nam, Chathoth
(2017: 6) argue, include ‘the digitization of systems, processes and services; a higher level of
interface between the tourist and the destination, which takes into account, among other
sectors, the local community and government; a greater involvement of the local residence in
the provision of products/services; a higher level of generation and use of data through
integrated intelligent systems; and, above all, a better orientation to the management of the
tourist experiences’.
However, many Authors converge towards the need for a holistic approach in defining a STD.
Boes et al. (2015), in one of the first works on STDs, provide a conceptualization identifying
some key dimensions complementary to technology: leadership, human and social capital,
entrepreneurship, innovation, social capital and human capital. Leadership makes possible a
coordination based on inclusion and participation of stakeholders in all phases of destination
planning. Entrepreneurship and innovation support tourism projects at the destination level and
concretize ideas that can attract new entrepreneurial initiatives. The creation of social capital is
the result of integrated processes of collaboration and competition between stakeholders, which
increase the potential of knowledge of the entire tourism system of the destination. Finally, a
continuous evolution of human capital is guaranteed by the participation of stakeholders, the
development of collaborations, processes of cross-fertilisation, as well as by innovation itself.
Starting from these studies, Lopez de Avila (2015) has defined a STD as an ‘innovative tourism
destination, built on a state-of-the-art technological infrastructure that guarantees the
sustainable development of tourist areas, accessible to all, that facilitates interaction and
integration with the surrounding environment, increases the quality of the experience in the
destination and improves the quality of life’.
Despite the numerous theoretical contributions, that of smart destination is still an emerging
topic in the literature, that requires the combination of knowledge from different disciplines
(Vargas-Sánchez, 2016): information systems, tourism management, marketing, urban
planning, destination management and governance, but also data processing and analysis.
Moreover, there are no studies that propose a process model providing an operational path for
transforming a destination into a smart destination and that suggest best practices to ensure its
sustainable management (Boes et al., 2016).
A recent attempt in this direction has been offered by Ivars-Baidal, Celdrán-Bernabeu, Mazón
& Perles-Ivars (2017). These authors relied on the concept of smart tourism ecosystems (Baggio
& Del Chiappa, 2014b; Gretzel et al., 2015b) seeing a tourism destination as a networked
physical system integrated by a technological infrastructure shaping a digital environment that
aims to favor cooperation and knowledge transfer. Based on this theoretical lens, Ivars-Baidal
et al (2017: 570) have proposed a model of STD structured in three levels: the strategic-
relational level, based on a governance characterized by public-private cooperation to ensure
the sustainability of the destination and an environment of open and collaborative innovation;
the instrumental level, based on digital connectivity and sensoring to configure a destination
information system essential for decision making; the applied level, which allows the
development of intelligent solutions for marketing and management of the destination resulting
in greater efficiency in communication actions and an improvement of the tourist experience.
However, the existing literature suffers from a lack of empirical studies aimed to investigate to
what extent a smart tourism destination is smart because of a relevant injection of various types
of technologies that theoretically should enable B2B, B&C and C&C relationships or whether,
and better, is smart because it builds first, or simultaneously, an effective environment that can
be supported and echoed by technology. This study was therefore carried out to contribute
filling this research gap by applying a network analytical approach to the physical and digital
components of three tourism destinations.

3. Materials and methods

This section is divided into two parts that correspond to the two goals of the paper. The first
one contains a literature review of recent studies on smartness in tourism destinations; the
review was performed as a content analysis to identify the most relevant and popular concepts
related to smart tourism in existing scholarly works. The second part applies the methods of
network science to identify the effects of a technological layer to the overall efficiency of the
smart tourism system when this layer is well integrated with the physical network made of the
stakeholders of the destination and a good revision of the main processes is performed with the
objective of enhancing their effectiveness.

3.1. Content analysis

For the purposes of our work we selected the most relevant papers on smart destinations. There
is practically no literature review that can claim to be fully exhaustive, and obviously, there is
no pretense of completeness here as well, but rather the attempt to understand what the main
trends in the research for this area are. Therefore, we choose the papers to be analyzed using
the SCOPUS database. Other possible sources exist, but in selecting the most relevant
publications the overlap is almost certain, and adding less popular venues, provided they exist,
would have not improved much the conclusions we reached.
Scopus is considered by many to be probably the most comprehensive source of scholarly
articles and academic work in the social sciences (Vieira & Gomes, 2009), and covers 5,000
publishers, 23,700 titles, and over 71 million records. According to Chadegani et al (2013), it
is the largest searchable citation and abstract source of searching literature, which is continually
expanded and updated. These authors also underline that Scopus allows users to evaluate
journals based on the number of citations, articles published, and percentage not cited. While
Scopus only contains articles starting from 1996, a main limitation of the database (Viera and
Gomes 2009), this has no impact on the research about innovative issues such as smart tourism.
The Scopus database was interrogated using ‘smart AND tour* AND destination’ as search
terms for titles and abstracts. The results were then inspected visually to remove items irrelevant
for the purposes of this work. The final list contains 147 papers published between 2010 and
2018 (see Appendix 1). Obviously, the sample is not “statistically significant”, but, given the
wide coverage of relevant journals in the Scopus database, we consider the selected papers more
than suitable for providing an overview on the main themes investigated in the area of smart
destinations.
Titles, abstracts and keywords were examined with standard textual analysis techniques,
implemented through scripts using the Natural Language Tool Kit (Bird et al., 2009), Gensim
(Řehůřek & Sojka, 2010) and Scikit-learn (Pedregosa et al., 2011) Python packages. After
cleaning of the text to remove punctuation, common words and inflectional forms (via
stemming and lemmatization) we derived a frequency distribution for words and 2-grams
(contiguous sequences of two words).
We then applied a stochastic algorithm for topic modelling. The general idea of the technique
is that a person who writes a document has certain topics in mind and uses words, with a certain
probability, chosen from the pool of words characterizing that particular topic. A whole
document can then be represented as a mixture of different topics. Among the many possible
modelling algorithms, we chose the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Latent Semantic
Indexing (LSI) as they are consistently mentioned as the most reliable (Eickoff & Neuss, 2017;
Sharma & Sharma, 2017).
The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a generative statistical model for ensembles of
discrete data (e.g. text collections). It uses a hierarchical Bayesian model to extract the latent,
or hidden, topics present in a collection of documents and to model each document as a finite
combination of the set of topics. Each topic is associated with a probability distribution over
the set of terms that make up the vocabulary of the collection. Latent semantic indexing (LSI)
is an indexing method based on a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition
(SVD). SVD is employed to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and
concepts contained in a collection of text. It is based on the assumption that words used in
similar contexts tend to have similar meanings.
The outcomes of these algorithms are list of topics: each topic comes with a list of words
associated, with a certain probability, to each topic.

3.1.1. Network analysis

The second part is a reinterpretation of previous studies on digital ecosystem networks in which
the effectiveness of the combination of physical and virtual systems has been described and
discussed (Baggio & Del Chiappa, 2014a, 2014b; Del Chiappa & Baggio, 2015). The networks
represent three Italian destinations: the Elba Island, a known marine destination belonging to
the Tuscany region, Livigno, a northern Italian mountain area in Lombardy, and the marine
region of Costa Smeralda – Gallura in Sardinia. These destinations have relatively similar
structural and ‘touristic’ characteristics (see Baggio & Del Chiappa, 2014b and references
therein for more detailed descriptions). All data regarding these networks were obtained by
combining different documentary sources complemented with field interviews to informants
and a crawling of the destinations’ web spaces (detailed descriptions and discussions on the
collection of network data can be found in: Baggio et al., 2010 and Christopoulos, and Aubke,
2014). In more detail: lists of core tourism stakeholders (accommodation, travel agencies,
restaurants, associations, consortia, etc.) were obtained by the local tourism boards together
with those formed by their websites. These stakeholders form the nodes of the networks. The
links between any two of them were uncovered following the methods extensively described in
Baggio et al. (2010). In short, they represent the possible connections and relationships due to
commercial agreements, co-ownership, partnerships, membership in associations or consortia
derived from publicly available sources (listings, management board compositions, catalogues
of travel agencies, marketing leaflets and brochures, official corporate records, etc.). All links
were also validated through a number of in-depth interviews to knowledgeable informants such
as directors of tourism boards, tourism consultants or experts. The networks were then
complemented by the websites belonging to the different stakeholders that are connected via
the existing hyperlinks uncovered with a simple crawler.
Digital ecosystem networks are thus modelled as a composition of two components: the
‘physical’ network of stakeholders of the destination with their relationships, and the ‘virtual’
websites network. All networks are weighted. The connections between the different elements
were assigned a ‘score’ that translates, on a 1 to 3 scale the different costs or efforts in building
and maintaining these connections. The values assigned are: 1 for a link between two physical
nodes, 2 for a link between a physical and a virtual node and 3 for a link between two virtual
nodes (for a detailed discussion see: Baggio & Del Chiappa, 2014a, 2014b; Del Chiappa &
Baggio, 2015). The basic data for the three networks and their components are shown in table
1.
Table 1. Main dimensional characteristics of the destination networks

Destination Type Nodes Edges

Elba Physical 713 1636
Virtual 443 494
Ecosystem 1156 2712
Gallura Physical 2235 6077
Virtual 1477 2165
Ecosystem 3712 9718
Livigno Physical 468 1388
Virtual 283 566
Ecosystem 751 2740

Nodes are weighted as well. The weights represent the absorptive capacity of the different
entities included in the networks, that is their ability to acquire, retain and transfer the
knowledge available to them due to their internal functioning or because of the associated costs
(Cohen & Levinthal, 1990).
Intuition suggests, and research has confirmed, that improving the efficiency of internal
processes positively affects the absorptive capacity of an organization (Berente & Lee, 2014),
that is the effectiveness and efficiency with which different organizations can understand the
value of external information, internalize it and use it in their own operation (Cohen &
Levinthal, 1990; Dyer et al., 2001; Nooteboom, 2000). Besides that, and more relevant for our
arguments, revision and rationalization of the digital components has a similar effect. As
Roberts (2015) shows, a good integration of data and procedures, along with efficient
connections, jointly influence absorptive capacity. These effects also depend on the
environment in which the organization is embedded. In short, for smart tourism, if a destination
is efficient in its internal processes (operational and organizational), or works towards this goal,
an improvement is ensured.
For assessing the efficiency in information and knowledge transfer, a crucial element for that
‘technology savviness’ which profoundly affects the smartness of a region (see e.g. Gil-Garcia
et al., 2016), we used the metric recently suggested by Su et al. (2017). The authors recommend
including in such metric not only the efficiency of the transfer between actors (operationalized
as the weighted shortest path, or distance, between them, where the weight is an estimate of the
cost in communicating) but also the weighted clustering coefficients (here representing the
tendency to collaborate within the neighborhood) and the nodal characteristics (the absorptive
capacity). They also show theoretically and empirically how their metric better serves the
purpose with respect to the usual measures of transfer efficiency that consider only the distances
between nodes (Latora & Marchiori, 2001).
An important feature of this method is in the consideration of the nodal characteristics (nodal
weights) that usually are not present in standard network analytic procedures. Since we have
no information about the characteristics of the different stakeholders, we assign as absorptive
capacity a value from 1 to 4 (1 = lowest) randomly drawn from a geometric distribution (the
discrete version of an exponential distribution). For all virtual elements we assign the value 5,
which represents the high capability to store and transfer information of a digital system. To
simulate the increase in absorptive capacity due to a re-engineering of the internal processes we
increase (by 1) all stakeholders’ values that are lower than the maximum.
Although this procedure might seem arbitrary, as the assignment of weights to the links, it fits
our objective. In fact, we are not interested in the ‘real’ values of the absorptive capacities or
other actors’ features, but only in how the system changes its efficiency when there is a positive
variation in them.
The single actor’s transfer efficiency coefficient between two nodes i and j is:
𝐴 𝐴 ∙𝑆 ( () ( ))
𝑇 = 𝑒
𝑑 (𝑖, 𝑗)
where A is the absorptive capacity, S is the weighted degree of the link, dw is the weighted
distance and Cw the weighted clustering coefficient of the nodes involved. In their proposal the
authors also add relevance weights to the different components that here we disregard assuming
all elements equally important.
The overall knowledge transfer efficiency of the network (KEN) is obtained by summing all the
Tij and normalizing to the number of nodes N:
∑ 𝑇
𝐾𝐸𝑁 =
𝑁(𝑁 − 1)
In essence, starting from a given network of relationships in a digital ecosystem, and a given
distribution of actors’ characteristics, that can be assumed to represent both individual and
global ‘efficiency’, a numerical simulation is performed. In this, the effects of improving
these individual efficiencies on the whole digital ecosystem are assessed.

4. Results and discussion

4.1. Content analysis

The results of the content analysis are shown in table 2 and 3. Table 2 contains the most relevant
words and 2-grams used in the titles, abstracts and keywords in the papers chosen. Table 3
contains the topics identified using the procedures described in the previous section. The
combination of the two gives a clear idea of the main topics explored in the works considered
and can provide a better view on the main interests around which the idea of ‘smartness’ has
evolved so far.
Far from pretending to be a complete systematic literature review, our findings show that most
(if not all) terms used in existing studies aimed to debate, investigate and analyze the concept
of smart tourism destination are of technology-related nature.
Limited, if not absent, references to organizational processes, or items that imply changes or
restructuring of the entities examined appear to exist. This strongly confirms our impression
that existing literature seems to ignore, or at least to consider just implicitly, the need of re-
engineering the main processes related to the intra and inter-organizational dynamics, and does
not fully judge this aspect as a precondition to obtain effective outcomes from the spreading of
technology in a destination.

Table 2 The most frequent (top 25) words and 2-grams

Rank Words Rank 2-grams

1 tourism 1 smart tourism
2 smart 2 tourism destination
3 destination 3 smart city
4 tourist 4 smart destination
5 information 5 communication technology
6 datum 6 public transportation
7 city 7 mobile device
8 technology 8 destination management
9 based 9 social medium
10 service 10 tourism industry
11 user 11 tourist experience
12 experience 12 cultural heritage
13 application 13 location based
14 mobile 14 smart phone
15 management 15 social network
16 travel 16 tourism information
17 network 17 smart tourist
18 development 18 tourist attraction
19 planning 19 augmented reality
20 location 20 datum mining
21 online 21 real time
22 device 22 tourism experience
23 industry 23 business model
24 internet 24 competitive advantage
25 medium 25 cultural tourism
 Table 3 The main (top 15) topics with their main components (top 10 words) discovered with the LDA and LSI algorithms

Method Top topics Term 1 Term 2 Term 3 Term 4 Term 5 Term 6 Term 7 Term 8 Term 9 Term 10
Topic #1 city smart transportation cities public destination bus data tourism urban
Topic #2 smart information destination tourism destinations application service competitive travel recommendations
Topic #3 smart guides destination tour transportation audio tourists tourism service web
Topic #4 destination tourism information smart online model analysis web data tourist
Topic #5 smart tourism information data travel destinations destination gps city tourist
Topic #6 data destination smart tourism city application mining tourists services experience
Topic #7 tourism destination smart data destinations tourist management tourists information mobile
LDA Topic #8 information smart data tourism destination travel city users people technologies
Topic #9 tourism smart city transportation people public integrated cities destinations data
Topic #10 tourism smart cultural destination information mobile tourist technology model data
Topic #11 city smart bus tourism rural local tourists cars destination cities
Topic #12 tourist information smart tourists mobile tourism destination travel data planning
Topic #13 smart tourist data destination tourism travel information charging navigation walking
Topic #14 smart tourist tourism network traffic gaze tourists destination selfie-taking heritage
Topic #15 tourism smart destination information online tourists destinations city data model
Topic #1 tourism smart destination information data tourist tourists city destinations study
Topic #2 city tourism transport urban smart cities interchange information city-hub public
Topic #3 information tourism tourist data smart mobile travel traffic cultural planning
Topic #4 destination media information tourism model exposure smart intention visit reputation
Topic #5 data tourist tourists planning smart trip mining mobile tourism online
Topic #6 information smart tourist study data tourism media model visit cultural
Topic #7 traffic tourist smart information network frame data node tourism algorithm
LSI Topic #8 mobile tourists smart risk information devices perceived traffic travel model
Topic #9 cultural destination information online data mobile heritage reputation model traffic
Topic #10 tourist mobile transportation tourism network public smart experience planning algorithm
Topic #11 cultural model media information online experience data destination smart technologies
Topic #12 city transportation public information cultural management payment user application traffic
Topic #13 online city transportation analysis management tourists destination mobile experience people
Topic #14 tourists transportation public integrated smart mobile management application tourism experience
Topic #15 mobile analysis management tourists smart mining social destinations reputation transportation
 4.2. Network-based analytical approach
Findings of the network-based analytical approach (table 4) provide insights about the overall
knowledge transfer efficiencies of the network (T), before and after the improvement in
absorptive capacity (AC) that the technology components can inject in the ecosystem when
correctly coupled with an effective functioning of the physical component of the inter-
organizational network. As it can be noticed, when AC increases, even if of a modest quantity,
a significant improvement in the overall knowledge transfer and assimilation efficiency can be
obtained for the three networks.

Table 4 Knowledge transfer efficiencies (T): the difference and the AC improvement for the
three networks

Destination AC T_Before T_After T

Elba 20.7% 0.0124 0.0181 46.2%
Gallura 17.9% 0.0062 0.0084 36.1%
Livigno 21.0% 0.0334 0.0471 41.1%

These results suggest that tourism destinations can benefit from an injection and a rational use
of information and communication technologies (characterizing them as smart), especially if
their overall absorptive capacities increase. To improve in absorptive capacities an effective
process re-engineering within intra and inter-organizational groups needs to be put in place so
that the digital component of the business ecosystem can be furthering the efficacy of the
physical component in a search of a smart effectiveness of the destination as a whole. It must
also be noted here that the average contribution of a node to T (e.g. knowledge transfer
efficiencies) is of the order of 10-4. So, unless a large proportion of them moves towards a
revision of their processes we would not see much improvements at the destination level. Again,
the importance of working coordinately and cooperatively is very high as often claimed in much
research (e.g. Del Chiappa & Presenza, 2013; Wang & Xiang, 2007).

In summary, the content analysis has allowed to identify the main topics discussed in the most
relevant literature on smart tourism, from this analysis a ’missing’ issue has been identified,
that of basic re-engineering and rationalization of the processes of that should be the basis to
an effective use of information and communication technologies. Starting from this
consideration, a numerical simulation has shown how an improvement in this respect (process
efficiencies) can benefit not only individual entities, but the functioning of the whole digital
ecosystem.

5. Concluding remarks

This study aimed at contributing to the scientific debate on the relatively recent strand of
research on smart tourism destinations. Supported and stimulated by the insights of a content
analysis applied to recent papers (published in the period 2010-2018) sourced from Scopus, it
presents and discusses findings of a network analytic investigation of three Italian tourism
destinations with the objective of providing further evidences to the idea that smartness of
tourism destination require that the physical component of the inter-organizational network is
able to function effectively in order to allow any technological injection to produce its benefits.
Findings confirm this idea. The starting point is the idea that a smart tourism destination is a
complex and dynamic ecosystem where the physical and digital components are structurally
and strongly coupled and co-evolve as a single entity. This, as we show, means that the digital
component, by itself, is not a sufficient condition able to render a tourism destination smart.
The digital injection can support the transformation of a tourism destination toward smartness
only when the physical component of the ecosystem is profoundly reengineered and
rationalized. Under these circumstances the blended co-evolution renders the overall network
smart and allows it to benefit from higher level of efficiency and effectiveness in knowledge
transfer and information acquisition processes which, in turn, favors value creation within the
destination. Moreover, echoing Del Chiappa and Baggio (2015), this study strongly suggests
that knowledge-based destination management studies should consider both physical and
digital components of the ecosystem.
Besides its theoretical and contribution, this work stresses the importance of adopting a more
critical-driven thinking when viewing information and communication technologies (ICTs) as
a possible solution of the problems in destination competitiveness. This issue is well examined
in a long tradition of studies on computerized information systems. Since the 1990s the
literature has provided examples and warnings on the risks of using technological tools without
first going through a deep revision and re-engineering of the systems or procedures at play, and
how this ‘forgetfulness’ might produce situations in which even heavy investments in ICTs
result in very poor efficiency or economic progresses (Brynjolfsson, 1993; Hammer, 1990). It
has also been clearly demonstrated how the impacts of ICTs on organizational performance is
fully mediated by business process agility. (Chen et al., 2014). These considerations have also
been made in the analysis of smart cities, where recent research shows the importance of a
revision of the main processes before adopting a technological coverage. (Budhiputra and Putra,
2016). In other words: injecting technologies into tourism destinations and organizations
working within them, and allowing them to have available, potentially, a huge amount of
information and data to be shared, without intervening in assuring an effective networking in
the socio-physical component of the network is not per se a solution. Actually, if this injection
is proposed deceiving tourism stakeholders and making them think that technologies will
automatically boost the smartness of the tourism destinations, one could create over-
expectations that, if not satisfied, could result into a further distrust in any destination
management operations.

5.1. Theoretical implications

The main contribution of this study is methodological. We have provided, with the analysis of
three digital ecosystems, and the simulation performed, a way to assess the relative importance
and the role played by their physical and virtual components and shown how using state-of-the-
art network analytic methods is possible to evaluate the extent to which one of the components
influences the other. This can be better gauged and made more realistic if the weights used for
the nodes and the links of the destination ecosystem are calibrated with data coming from
empirical studies or observations.
 5.2. Practical implications
From a practical point of view, this contribution provides two important indications. First of
all, policy makers and destination marketers should persuade stakeholders that a tourism
destination is the expression of a collective effort by different actors belonging to different (but
interlinked) tourism sub-sectors that requires a profound process re-engineering within intra
and inter-organizational relationships to become efficient and effective in the way the
knowledge dissemination, transfer and absorptions can occur within the destination; this in turn,
would increase innovation and destination competitiveness. In an attempt to achieve this goal,
destination marketers and policy makers should also rely on using a broader set of coordination
mechanisms that go beyond the mere internal communication and marketing; these might
include any effort directed to affirm social norms (e.g. trust and reciprocity) and to create and
sustain interlocking directorates and temporary staff exchange (e.g. Bregoli and Del Chiappa,
2013).
Secondly, destination marketers and policy makers should intensity their efforts in motivating
stakeholders in investing in various types of technologies aimed at shaping a common
technological-driven infrastructure and giving rise to a proper business digital ecosystem. This
simultaneous reinforcement of both the physical and digital components of the ecosystem (i.e.
the tourism destination) would help to achieve higher effectiveness in knowledge transfer,
innovation and destination governance. Any circumstances in which one of the two components
is neglected or ill-evaluated (under- or over-) will result in a sub-optimal level of information
and knowledge sharing and, in turn, in lower degrees of destination efficiency and
competitiveness.
Tourism stakeholders need to be educated and informed that technologies can facilitate the
operations and improve the competitiveness of their businesses and their destination only if
they facilitate a cultural and organizational change and a transformation in the way they manage
their intra and inter-organizational processes and relationships. In this vein, policy makers and
destination marketers should focus their efforts on running internal marketing operations aimed
at reinforcing simultaneously both the components of the ecosystem (i.e. the tourism
destination) when trying to achieve effectiveness in destination branding and governance.

5.3. Limitations and future research

Although this study helps to fill a gap in the existing knowledge and proposes some implications
for practitioners, limitations still remain. First, the study was limited just to three tourism
destinations. For the future, it would be interesting to repeat the analysis widening the number
of destinations involved, possibly sourcing them from different countries. Second, the study
suffers from an arbitrary assignment of nodal and link characteristics (weights). Future studies
could address this limitation by better measuring these dimensions and relate them to real
situations using some kind of empirical investigation.
This study aims to be a starting point for scholars interested in the topic of “smart tourism
destinations” so that they can direct their research on the ways, mechanisms and tools to
implement a smart approach, both for policy makers and private actors.
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