Smart tourism destinations: a demand-based approach for improving local tourism management

Abstract

The ‘Smart Tourism Destination’ (STD) concept has progressively become commonplace in the public tourism agenda and its principles are inspiring many institutional projects. However, academia hasn’t provided yet a robust theoretical foundation and empirical support for this new destination management approach. This emerging approach risks being misled since tourists themselves, as the main focus of policies and actions, haven’t been actively considered either in research or in public projects hitherto. Acknowledging this gap, this doctoral dissertation aims to provide a tourism demand-centred perspective of the multifaceted STD approach for better informing the local public tourism management of the potential smart destinations.