SMART Destinations: new strategies to manage tourism industry

Purpose - There is a general recognition of the role of new technologies in facilitating the involvement of all stakeholders in the destination governance and in supporting more sustainable development processes. The purpose of this paper is to outline a comprehensive and systematized analysis of the concept of SMART CITIES applied to tourism. In particular, this study attempts to explore the potential and challenges of knowledge management, in particular the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), in supporting stakeholders collaboration processes in the tourism destination by focusing on e-democracy. Design/methodology/approach - A case study approach is adopted as it enables the researchers to pose, in depth, issues such as destination governance's experience with Knowledge Management and ICTs implementation. The present research is exploratory and based on the usage of secondary data. Specifically, the research site chosen in this study is the Liguria Region (Italy), where a somehow project of tourism planning and governance is currently going on relying on the usage of WEB 2.0 to shape the stakeholders' engagement. Originality/value - Originality/value - Starting from the results of this project, we want to define specific guidelines to understand how a Smart Tourism Destination, through the exchange of knowledge between different actors (both supply and demand sides), can serve as the starting point to create an experiential tourism system highly differentiated and able to improve the destination competitiveness. Practical implications - The development of Smart Tourism Destinations can support the diffusion of dynamic networking and proactive management and customer orientation. In this direction, practical implications will focus on the potential replicability of the experience of Smart Tourism Destination in other locations.