Towards Smart Tourism Destination: An Empirical Study on Sharm El Sheikh City, Egypt

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics