Business Models and Partners Engagement for Smart Tourism

The term smart has become a buzzword and lately it has even been associated to the tourism. In fact, new technologies are revolutionizing the tourism market establishing the Smart Tourism. The topic Smart Tourism is strictly linked to the topic smart city. As it will be discussed later in the work, the Smart Tourism is easier to implement in those cities that have already moved to become smart cities. Adoption of IoT systems such as sensors and beacons are generating huge amount of digital information named Big Data. More tourism destinations should make an optimal use of big data. The tourism industry is composed by several stakeholders and thanks to the technologies mentioned before, stakeholders have the opportunity to collect useful information for themselves or for other actors. These information should be shared among them in order to create value and to exploit all the benefits of Smart Tourism. Unfortunately, without a common line and standard processes this is not simple to realize. The true challenge is to have coexisting actors which have different interests and are often in competition with each other. The goal of this work is to analyze the state of the art of the Smart Tourism, to identify all stakeholders involved, to understand what is working or not and to understand whether there are best practices in the development of Smart Tourism projects. Starting from this overview, the work will find a meeting point that makes the collaboration advantageous for each actor involved in the different processes linked to tourism. In order to reach this result, it would be necessary to change current business models. First of all, they have to be integrated with new technologies in order to propose innovative value propositions. In addition, a new kind of relationship with partners should be thought in order to make projects sustainable.