European Capital of Smart Tourism: An Initiative to Promote the Tourism Industry

Smart Tourism Cities

Smart cities are increasingly becoming prominent in tourism as democratic ecosystems, because of their ability to attract potential tourists from any region across the globe and to protect the underlying environment (Araya, 2015). To be more precise, smart tourism cities focus on promoting innovation, boosting teamwork, and developing leadership practices extensively (Gretzel et al., 2016). The theoretical policy or managerial underpinning of smart tourism cities can be best understood by looking at factors such as smart tourism, open innovation and technology, as well as business ecosystems, big data, and the internet of things (IoT). As a consequence, smart tourism, technology, and business ecosystems represent the co-creation of tourism experiences and the exchange of related resources. Big data, on the other hand, entails the processing of the huge amounts of data that flow to a company on a daily basis. By contrast, open innovation denotes modernisation in any specific aspect by depending not only on one’s own resources but also by collaborating with others. The IoT further refers to the network of instruments such as sensors, electronics and software that help with the exchange of any sort of data (Gretzel, Sigala, Xiang, & Koo, 2015).