Smart Tourism Destination Governance

Technology and Design-Based Approach

Tomáš Gajdošík

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000597127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Drawing upon empirical research and critical literature review, Smart Tourism Destination Governance: Technology and Design-Based Approach provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of smart tourism destination governance and its related challenges.

Building on the author's extensive research background in tourism destinations and information technologies, the book provides a quantitative approach to the phenomenon, using cluster and network analysis. It uses design thinking to provide solutions on how to overcome the challenges faced within the context of tourism destination governance, with a detailed discussion of the contribution of the smart approach to overcoming such challenges. The book is presented in three parts as follows:

Part 1: The Need for a New Form of Tourism Destination Governance
Part 2: The Contribution of Smart Approach to Overcoming the Challenges of Tourism Destination Governance
Part 3: Designing Smart Tourism Destination Governance Towards Sustainability, Competitiveness and Resilience

This work will be of great interest to both tourism scholars and decision-makers within the field of tourism, aiming to provide a detailed overview of and broaden the reader's horizons in regards to the possibilities of the smart approach to tourism destination governance.

Part 1 The need for a new form of tourism destination governance

DOI: 10.4324/9781003269342-2

Tourism destinations are the raison d’ être of tourism and its development. They are the key element of the tourism system and places of interaction among various stakeholders activated by tourists. In order to be competitive, sustainable and resilient, tourism destinations need to have rules and mechanisms for steering destination development and enabling effective decision-making. Therefore, tourism destination governance is needed. Today’s tourism destination governance is confronted with a highly complex and dynamic environment, creating several challenges that are hard to solve through linear rationalising. Developments in technology, climate change and growing uncertainty are altering common governance models and make it increasingly difficult to steer the destination development in such a complex socio-technical system (Volgger et al. 2021). The interaction between a destination, its stakeholders and tourists is changing towards user-centeredness, while a more collaborative approach is needed. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) can foster the experience co-creation and facilitate decision-making (Buhalis et al. 2019). Within the complex sets of issues, traditional approaches to destination governance have reached their limits and a new form of governance is being sought.

To achieve better governance, technological solutions applied to the growing amount of data available can bring new knowledge to destinations. With the help of the design approach, this part of the book provides the conceptual foundations of smart destination governance. Based on an in-depth literature review, the foundations of destination governance and its challenges are outlined. Moreover, it deals with the fact that a complex and changing environment forces the implementation of a smart concept with design thinking to destination governance. Although the importance of using design thinking in destination development was established almost 50 years ago (Gunn 1972), the recent advances in information technologies make it possible to overcome the limitations of previous methods and provide a more analytical approach to this phenomenon. This situation pushes forward the concept of smart tourism destination governance, which integrates the use of ICTs and design principles in decision-making and steering the destination development. Smart destination governance is built on transdisciplinary thinking, taking into account addressing complex issues in a human-centred and participatory manner. With the help of technologies and data analytics, it supports the tourist-centric approach, underpinned by design thinking methodology, and focuses on experience enrichment. Moreover, it builds on public policy approach to decision-making, based on the need for collaboration between the main stakeholders through the use of technologies, which is evident mainly in the smart city concept.

References

• Buhalis, D., Harwood, T., Bogicevic, V., Viglia, G., Beldona, S., and Hofacker, C., 2019. Technological disruptions in services: Lessons from tourism and hospitality. Journal of Service Management, 30 (4), 484–506.
• Gunn, C., 1972. Vacationscape: Designing tourist areas. Austin: Bureau of Business Research, University of Texas at Austin.
• Volgger, M., Erschbamer, G., and Pechlaner, H., 2021. Destination design: New perspectives for tourism destination development. Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, 19 (March), 100561.

1 Tourism destination governance and its challenges

DOI: 10.4324/9781003269342-3

Tourism destinations are focal points of tourism activity and an important subject of tourism research. They are the fundamental unit of analysis in any modelling of a tourism system (Pike 2008). Although there are several ways to define tourism destination, the current research streams highlight mainly the fact that tourism destination consists of a number of different components. From the supply-side perspective, there are stakeholders of different sizes and structures. Tourists and their behaviour represent the demand side. There are dynamic connections among these components, which are many times non-linear, resulting from the fact that there are rarely simple cause and effect relationships between these elements and a small stimulus may cause a large effect, or no effect at all (e.g. the law of diminishing returns in economics). Moreover, due to the impact of the external environment, these relations are open and unpredictable (Baggio 2008). From this point of view, tourism destinations are viewed as complex adaptive systems of interrelated and independent stakeholders (Baggio 2008; Pearce 2014), where the tourism demand meets the supply.

Even if it was not explicitly defined as such, the idea that tourism is a complex system has been discussed for a long time. The European, mainly German-speaking, economic literature is much aware of Kaspar’s model of tourism system (Kaspar 1976). It consists of two subsystems – subject and object that are under the impact of economic, social, ecological, political and technological spheres. The Anglo-Saxon literature focusing on tourism geography was influenced by the Leiper’s system model of tourism (Leiper 1979). It comprises two subsystems (components) – tourist generating regions and tourist destinations connected by transit routes and influenced by broader environments: physical, cultural, social, economic, political and technological. These models helped to understand the structure and dynamic evolutions of the tourism system. In this system, tourist behaviour, measured as both spatial and temporal flows, activates the production system of tourism experiences and the supply of tourism products within a destination (Choe & Fesenmaier 2021). Therefore, tourism destinations are increasingly viewed as experience production systems (Tussyadiah 2014). This complexity makes destinations difficult to manage in terms of sustainability, competitiveness and resilience.

1.1 Approaches to tourism destination development

To understand and promote the sustainable competitiveness of tourism destination and its development, several approaches have been developed by tourism researchers (Pechlaner, Kozak, & Volgger 2014). The most discussed ones include destination management, governance and leadership. The debate on destination management has evolved mainly alongside two streams of research. The first focused on destination marketing (e.g. Pike 2008; Pike & Page 2014), while the latter gave attention to the much broader management concept related to strategising, exercising control, coordinating organisations and leveraging destination resources (Hristov & Zehrer 2015) towards competitiveness. Destination management has been a primary concern with defining objectives and trying to achieve these mechanisms by corporate thinking with a special focus on relatively broad authority of destination management organisations (DMOs) (Pechlaner, Beritelli, Pichler, Peters, & Scott 2015). The management concept puts forward managerial understanding relying on the hierarchical nature of bureaucratic structure (Bramwell & Lane 2011). This conventional top-down approach has not fully taken into consideration the need for stakeholder participation in the destination development.

Many scholars (e.g. Beritelli & Bieger 2014; Hall 2008) understate this top-down, centralised and bureaucratic approach of the public sector, and provide recommendations to an alternative ‘bottom-up’, decentralised form of governance in which stakeholders, together with local communities, are determined to take more responsibility for destination management, marketing and planning of collaborative actions. Therefore, academics and practitioners started to focus more on highlighting multi-actor complexity, public–private interdependency, coordination, control and leadership. This shift to a more bottom-up approach, where businesses and local communities were encouraged to provide input to destination development has been observed (Vernon et al. 2005). This led to a change in the perspective towards destination governance focused on processes and structures. As a complement to destination governance, destination leadership is being discussed, dealing with the role of leaders and how they influence other stakeholders (Pechlaner et al. 2014). This sound approach has been gaining more and more attention as destinations are highly fragmented and involve a diverse set of stakeholders having contrasting objectives and divergent priorities (Hristov & Zehrer 2015). Looking at destination leadership as a supplemental dimension of destination governance, it can be concluded that destination governance is based on the common vision of tourism development, suitable organisational structures and instruments for decision-making and leaders who are able to lead stakeholders and motivate them in their common efforts (Kučerová et al. 2018).

The discussed approaches to tourism destination development have made significa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I The need for a new form of tourism destination governance
• Part II The contribution of smart approach to overcoming the challenges of tourism destination governance
• Part III Designing smart tourism destination governance towards sustainability, competitiveness and resilience
• Index