From the traditional understanding of tourism destination to the smart tourism destination

Abstract

The paper reviews the evolution of key tourism destination concepts, with the aim to emphasize the extent of changes that occurred in understanding the term ‘destination’ over the past decades. A special emphasis is placed on the concept of smart tourism destinations, since this is a recent concept that strongly relies on the systemic concept, and represents a completely different understanding of a destination, as opposed to the traditional concept. The digital revolution has led to the emergence of concept of smart destinations in which knowledge and information are accessible to all stakeholders, facilitating them to carry out continuous innovation of their activities, as much as possible. Without using digital technologies enabling adequate public–private–consumer collaboration, it is almost impossible nowadays to achieve successful market valorization of destinations’ geographical attributes.