Journal of Smart Tourism: A New Platform to Support and Define an Emerging Field

It was with great pleasure to learn that a few colleagues of mine were putting together a new academic journal called “Smart Tourism.” Considering tourism is already a fairly crowded field with 100 or so outlets for academic research, this was obviously a bold move and I admire and commend their courage. However, I was not surprised, because, like my colleagues, I also believe that now is time to channel an increasingly important discussion into a formal outlet in the shape of a new journal. The notion of smart tourism has been gaining traction in both practice and theoretical development. In countries such as South Korea, China, Spain and several others, smart tourism has been adopted as a general principle for national level policy making with respect to tourism development and sustainability. Destinations around the world are increasingly using smart tourism as an overall strategic framework to redefine destination marketing and management. Tourism enterprises are embracing and utilizing various smart technologies to re-engineer and redesign their products and services in order to cater to the digitally connected, technology-enabled consumer market.