There is not a clear distinction between a smart city and a smart destination. It can be defined as a destination that adopts an interactive/participative management style and aims to enhance the residents’ and tourists’ quality of life by using ICTs and other technologies for data collection, storage, exchange, and processing. Smart destinations focus on the effective and efficient use of resources, a cleaner environment, and ultimately sustainability.
Published in Chapter:
A New Concept in Tourism: Smart Tourism Destinations
Gamze Coban (Faculty of Tourism, Nevsehir Haci Bektas Veli University, Turkey) and Şule Aydın (Faculty of Tourism, Nevsehir Haci Bektas Veli University, Turkey)
Copyright: © 2020
|Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-1989-9.ch019
Abstract
This chapter provides an insight into the topic of smart destinations. By adopting smart technologies, tourism destinations, as well as cities, gain more opportunities to offer better quality of life for residents and visitors. Smart cities aim to improve resource management, sustainability, and living conditions in urban environments by utilizing ICTs. The concept of smart tourism destination, deriving from smart city, refers to the use of technology in tourism destinations to increase the service quality and tourist satisfaction by focusing on tourists' expectations. In other words, smart tourism destinations aim to integrate technology into the destination for these purposes. This chapter presents the concepts of smart city, smart tourism, and smart destination. The emergence of smart city and smart destination concepts and the issues and challenges they might face are discussed. In addition to some future research directions, a brief discussion on potential controversies is presented.