Abdel Rady, H., khalf, A. (2019). Towards Smart Tourism Destination: An Empirical Study on Sharm El Sheikh City, Egypt. International Journal of Heritage, Tourism and Hospitality, 13(1), 78-95. doi: 10.21608/ijhth.2019.35106
Hussein Abdel Rady; Asmaa khalf. "Towards Smart Tourism Destination: An Empirical Study on Sharm El Sheikh City, Egypt". International Journal of Heritage, Tourism and Hospitality, 13, 1, 2019, 78-95. doi: 10.21608/ijhth.2019.35106
Abdel Rady, H., khalf, A. (2019). 'Towards Smart Tourism Destination: An Empirical Study on Sharm El Sheikh City, Egypt', International Journal of Heritage, Tourism and Hospitality, 13(1), pp. 78-95. doi: 10.21608/ijhth.2019.35106
Abdel Rady, H., khalf, A. Towards Smart Tourism Destination: An Empirical Study on Sharm El Sheikh City, Egypt. International Journal of Heritage, Tourism and Hospitality, 2019; 13(1): 78-95. doi: 10.21608/ijhth.2019.35106
Towards Smart Tourism Destination: An Empirical Study on Sharm El Sheikh City, Egypt
The quick advancement of modern technology imposes computerization and digitizing to all societies. The smart tourism destinations concept comes from the advances in smart cities. Recently, destinations began to reshape their duties and their entrepreneurial logics, involving tourists as active providers and initiators of their own experiences and considering new technologies as the essential instruments for deciding tourism outcomes. It means the advent of a novel pattern of destinations, the smart tourism destinations, in which new technologies are so comprehensively utilized to have a crucial impact on tourism experiences, improves destinations’ abilities to compete and favor tourism development projects, starting from these issues. The aim of the research is to investigate the development of Sharm El-Sheikh as a smart tourism destination and add to the ongoing debate on innovation in tourism, by presenting an interpretative framework indicating the way in which technological instruments in a smart tourism destination may enhance the co-creation of tourism experiences. This research used the descriptive analytical approach, where a questionnaire was prepared and distributed to a random sample of seventy five (75) experts in information and communication technologies and academic experts in the tourism sector. 60 (80%) of sample was retrieved. The research reached several results, the highest mean values for barriers to become smart tourism destinations emerged for the item “deficiency of staff” (mean = 4.60, standard deviation =0.848).The highest mean value for opportunities to become a smart tourism destination is the item “Possibility of a network of municipalities as a platform for collaboration” (mean=4.60, standard deviation = 0.588). The research recommended that smart tourism destinations should be use of networks and technologies more effectively and efficiently. Training programs should also be considered to better utilize tools and techniques needed, to establish such kind of destinations.
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