Smart Tourism Destination Governance

Purpose - This paper starts from the smart city concept and addresses its relevance for the tourism management literature to develop a process framework of "smart tourism destination governance", which identifies the temporal stages and the crucial actions to take for designing and implementing a governance model oriented at the smart transformation of destinations. Tourism management literature has recently showed increasing interest in exploring the potential offered by the smart city concept, mainly conceived as the integrated use of ICT solutions, for achieving higher competitiveness. However, the pure adoption of innovative technologies is likely to be ineffective without adequate governance structures and processes that are required for ensuring the commitment and effective coordination and integration of firms, government and communities towards a holistic smart-oriented development plan for the tourism destination. This paper aims at bridging the smart city paradigm with the destination governance literature: the elaboration of a smart tourism destination governance process framework provides a valuable contribution for understanding how to effectively apply smartness principles for increasing the sustainable competitiveness of the destination beyond the mere technology dimension, making explicit the role of collaborative structures, user-driven service, social innovation and local community involvement. Design/methodology/approach - We draw on a critical review of the literature on destination governance and smart cities and tourism to identify the main temporal stages and the crucial actions to take in each stage for designing a smart tourism destination governance. The model makes explicit the linkages existing between relevant theories and all the identified stages of the development pathway for implementing an effective tourism destination smart governance model. For each stage the principles of a "smart logic" are integrated into the model, being used to define the specific content and form of actions to be taken to move along the destination journey towards smartness. Originality/value - This paper contributes to fill a relevant gap in the literature on tourism management by offering an original and integrative perspective for designing and implementing an effective smart tourism destination governance model. Practical implications - This framework is a flexible tool in the hands of destination managers for increasing the destination competitiveness; it shows how to match the design of governance structures and processes with the destination context, especially in terms of relational and knowledge capital of relevant stakeholders and implement smartness principles for its development following an incremental step by step logic.