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What is smart tourism and why is it so BIG?

Smart tourism is big business in the travel and tourism industry, but why is it so big and what does smart tourism actually do? Read on to learn more…

What is smart tourism?

A definition of smart tourism, types of smart tourism, smart tourism accessibility options, smart tourism sustainability initiatives, smart tourism information sharing, smart tourism research and management tools, smart tourist experiences, smart tourism: conclusion.

Smart tourism is defined according to the technological capabilities of a particular destination, attraction or the tourist themselves. Many destinations are now modernising to include increased use of smart technology in their operations ranging from payment methods to interactive activities.

The ultimate aim of smart tourism is to improve the efficiency of resource management, maximise competitiveness and to enhance sustainability through the use of technological innovations and practices. It is often associated with e-tourism as this will involve the use of technology.

One destination that is leading the way with their smart tourism industry is China, whereby tourists can use their phones to do simple tasks such as pay for taxis, order meals, check queue times and read information on the destination or attraction that they are visiting through a supplied QR code.

‘Smart’ has become somewhat of a buzzword in recent years.

In essence, for something to be ‘smart’ it needs to have complex technological capabilities in order to allow for the exploitation of a range of information that is then used to inform product development and operation. Whilst the average tourist may not be aware of what goes on behind the scenes, there is likely a lot of work that goes on to ensure maximum productivity and competitiveness.

Whilst the concept of ‘smart’ isn’t directly correlated with technology, in today’s world they are inevitably intertwined. In order to be ‘smart’, destinations, attractions and other tourism industry stakeholders will utilise a variety of technological innovations and practices (these are outlined shortly). As such, the use of technology is at the heart of the concept of smart tourism.

There hasn’t been a great deal of research into smart tourism to date. Most studies in the area focus instead on ‘smart cities’ or ‘smart destinations’.

Gretzel et al (2015) advocate that the notion of smart tourism is, in fact, a complex one, and that succinctly defining the term smart tourism is a difficult endeavour.

The The European Capital of Smart Tourism , define a smart destination as:

‘A destination facilitating access to tourism and hospitality products, services, spaces and experiences through ICT-based tools. It is a healthy social and cultural environment, which can be found through a focus on the city´s social and human capital. It also implements innovative, intelligent solutions and fosters the development of entrepreneurial businesses and their interconnectedness.’

To further elaborate, Buhalis and Amaranggana explain that:

‘Smart Tourism Destinations take advantage of: (1) Technology embedded environments; (2) Responsive processes at micro and macro levels (3) End-user devices in multiple touch-points; and (4) Engaged stakeholders that use the platform dynamically as a neural system.’

Taking into account the available literature at the time of writing, I have provided my own definition of smart tourism below.

‘Smart tourism is the act of tourism agents utilising innovative technologies and practices to enhance resource management and sustainability, whilst increasing the businesses overall competitiveness’.

resource management, maximise competitiveness and to enhance sustainability through the use of technological innovations and practices.

At the heart of smart tourism is technology, that much is clear. But the key is how this technology is used to make the tourism agent (destination management organisation , tourist attraction, hotel, restaurant etc) operate more effectively.

Below you will find five of the most common methods of implementing smart tourism.

Ways to implement smart tourism

Smart tourism can be implemented in any number of different ways, providing it achieves the outcomes of enhanced resource management, sustainability and competitiveness. There are five main ways to do this, although this list is, of course, not exhaustive. These five methods include; smart accessibility options, smart sustainability initiatives, smart information sharing, smart research and management tools and smart tourist experiences.

In order to a tourism agent to identify as smart tourism initiative, they must demonstrate that they are accessible to all, both in a physical and a digital sense. This means that everyone has access to the tourism provider, regardless of age, gender, religion, race, sexuality or disability.

A smart tourism attraction or destination should have a well development transport infrastructure that enables all types of people to travel (i.e. there is wheelchair access and lifts for parents with prams etc). This should also include reasonably priced transport options, which will usually be public transport.

At the attraction or destination itself, there should be opportunities for everybody to access all areas. This may include lifts and ramps for disabled people.

Smart tourism accessibility also includes language communications. This is something that I have personally grappled with a lot since moving to China . Many Chinese attractions do not provide information for non-Chinese speaking tourists. Others provide translation for only some selected information (this works both ways too- I have translated museum scripts to find that the English version provides comprehensive details, but the Chinese version omits certain facts or remarks).

There are some great examples of smart tourism accessibility implemented around the world. I personally like the wheelchair accessibility that is promoted in Malaga and the personal city helpers scheme in Helsinki .

Sustainable tourism is at the forefront of many tourism agent’s plans and operations nowadays, and for good reason. As I explained in my post ‘ Sustainable tourism explained ‘, such practices not only help to provide a good image for the organisation, but also help to combat the negative social , environmental and economic impacts of tourism.

An important arm of smart tourism is the sustainability sector. Tourism agents which operate successful smart tourism initiatives should have a considerable focus on sustainability; reducing their carbon footprint, adopting environmentally friendly approaches and taking into account the host communities and their needs.

There are many ways that organisations can use mart technology to improve their sustainability practices.

Helsinki demonstrated their commitment to sustainable tourism during their Sustainable Flow Festival and Estonia have their Green Key initiative. At a more local level, there are many eco hotels and resorts around the world as well as socially beneficial tourism forms such as volunteer tourism .

Of course, having sustainable practices alone doesn’t qualify a tourism agent as a smart tourism provider. These practices need to be underpinned by technologies, such as the use of solar panel lighting for example, that enable said practices to be achieved.

One of the key advancements enabling smart tourism to occur in recent years is the growth of information sharing platforms. The digitalisation of modern day society has opened up a wealth of opportunities for tourism providers to share information to a wide range of tourist types .

The growth of social media, QR codes and mini-programmes has provided tourism agents with opportunities that were not previously available.

Tourism organisations can now use these new opportunities to provide information prior, during and after the tourists’ visit. They can also utilise more efficient promotional methods and marketing on these online platforms.

Complex algorithms, cookies and other digital monitoring methods can help organisations to be more and more in tune with their consumers or potential consumers. This allows them to develop more suitable and targeted products.

Organisations have been capitalising on the new possibilities of smart tourism information sharing by adopting electronic means of sharing information, for example in a museum or exhibit, encouraging the use of particular social media hashtags and geotagging and developing custom made apps.

Whilst many organisations around the world have turned to smart tourism information sharing practices, China is leading the way in this domain. Chinese tourism attractions are abundant with QR codes and their social media sharing platform, WeChat, enables tourism providers to develop their own mini-programmes- kind of like apps, but less extensive and without the need to download anything.

Nowadays there are many methods of obtaining and monitoring information. Organisations now have a wealth of data at their fingertips.

Adopting smart tourism research and management tools, such as designing a custom-made tourism flow monitor or developing a tailor-made CRM programme, can dramatically improve business outcomes.

A good example of a destination that has implemented smart tourism research and management tools in this way is Malaga, where they have introduced a parking app to help travellers park more effectively and reduce congestion.

Perhaps the most obvious type of smart tourism (for the tourist at least), is the smart tourist experience.

Destinations, attractions and other tourism providers are now adopting innovative technological approaches to develop and enhance the tourism experience that they offer. This ranges from augmented reality applications to gaming and virtual reality. This article on the top 20 augmented reality travel apps show a few examples of how this works in practice.

In the UK, The Hub Hotel from Premier Inn has made augmented reality compatible with the wall maps in the hotel rooms. When these maps are viewed through a smart device the wall maps present additional information about some of the local places of interest.

On my recent trip to Qiandao Lake in China, I saw a virtual reality hot air ballon. Here tourists would wear a mask which would make them feel like they would be lifted to a height inside the hot air ballon, where they could appreciate the lake view around them. In reality, their feet would never leave the ground!

Is smart tourism the future of tourism? I would say so, yes. There are some brilliant examples of smart tourism initiatives around the world and countries like China are leading the way. Despite the evident growth in smart tourism, however, there is a dearth of information on the subject, most notably in the academic field.

Personally, I am excited to see the developments in the tourism industry in this regard over the coming years! What do you think?

Fareportal Explores the Future of Travel in Latest Article: How Tech Is Driving Smart Tourism

New York, New York, June 25, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Fareportal, the travel technology company behind leading online travel agencies CheapOair and OneTravel, is excited to announce the release of a new article that delves into the dynamic intersection of travel and technology: "Embracing the Future of Travel: How Tech is Driving Smart Tourism.”

As we step into the era of "smart tourism," travelers can look forward to a host of cutting-edge technological advancements that are transforming every aspect of their journeys. From AI-powered travel assistants and smart hotel rooms to virtual reality (VR) tours and big data analytics, these innovations are enhancing travel experiences like never before.

"Technology is transforming every part of the travel experience, making it more personalized, efficient, and immersive,” said Glenn Cusano, President of Fareportal. “At Fareportal, we are excited to be at the forefront of reporting on these innovations, helping travelers navigate the future of smart tourism."

AI-powered travel assistants are revolutionizing travel planning and experiences. These intelligent tools provide personalized recommendations and real-time updates, ensuring a smooth journey from start to finish. Meanwhile, smart hotel rooms are redefining hospitality with automation features that cater to modern travelers' needs. These hotels are offering voice-controlled devices, personalized room settings, and enhanced security measures, among other smart features.

VR and AR are changing how we plan and experience travel. VR tools provide immersive previews of destinations, while AR applications offer interactive and educational experiences. Big data is also playing a pivotal role in optimizing travel experiences. By analyzing large volumes of data, cities and travel providers can manage tourist flows, personalize services, and improve efficiency.

Smart tourism technologies also promote sustainable travel practices. IoT sensors in smart hotels optimize energy consumption, while data analytics help reduce overcrowding at popular destinations. These efforts contribute to the preservation of natural and cultural sites and enhance overall traveler satisfaction.

About Fareportal      Fareportal is New York-based travel technology company powering a next generation travel concierge service. Utilizing its innovative technology and company-owned and operated global contact centers, Fareportal has built strong industry partnerships providing customers access to over 500 airlines, a million lodgings, and hundreds of car rental companies around the globe. With a portfolio of consumer travel brands including CheapOair and OneTravel Fareportal enables consumers to book online, on mobile apps for iOS and Android, by phone, or live chat. Fareportal provides its airline partners with access to a broad customer base that books high-yielding international and domestic flight, lodging, and other travel and add-on ancillaries.   

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• U4SSC – Smart tourism: A path to more secure and...

U4SSC – Smart tourism: A path to more secure and resilient destinations

• Digital development
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• SDG 11 Sustainable cities and communities

In this issue

Digital advances are transforming how the world connects and impacts how data is shared between ecosystems, affecting behavioural patterns and encouraging innovation and sustainable, responsible growth strategies. Tourism is one of the sectors to digitize business processes on a global scale, by providing a number of tourist services online. Digitization is expected to continue enhancing the travel experience on its trajectory toward the global goals.

This Report is oriented towards demonstrating how technologies and the process of digitization are powerful tools for moving towards a tourism industry capable of ensuring its resilience, competitiveness, and sustainability in any scenario. It also provides practical recommendations for establishing a destination framework that will support cities in developing smart tourism destination platforms.

Related content

Gsr-24: regulation for the next stage of digital transformation, measuring digital development – ict development index 2024, national e-waste monitor: namibia 2024.

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Insights How Smart Tourism Experiences are Served by Technology

Today’s visitor journey is fragmented. Customer data can help brands unlock seamless, digitally-enabled guest experiences within connected smart destinations.

The concept of “smart destinations” or “smart tourism” has been advancing the guest experience for years, but there’s one piece of the puzzle that the travel and hospitality industry has yet to unlock: the integration of customer data for proactive insights that enable personalization.

Smart tourism defines travel experiences that are digitally enabled and connected to technology, allowing guests to efficiently navigate through foreign cities, book activities online and utilize their mobile devices to tackle their entire itinerary.

But smart tourism is entering a new era of seamless travel, served not only by technology, but also by customer data.  

“The future of smart tourism is travel experiences that are proactive,” says Mukundhan Sundaram, senior director of technology at Publicis Sapient. “You’re removing all points of friction and frustration by putting data in the hands of the customer to effectively guide their journey.” Mukundhan Sundaram , Senior Director of Technology of Publicis Sapient

Learn how the next era of smart tourism can build guest loyalty and how customer data will transform the end-to-end guest experience.

What smart tourism is—and what it isn’t

Smart destinations are often enabled by specific technology upgrades, like mobile apps or online booking platforms, but that’s not all it is. Smart tourism is tourism that transforms the end-to-end guest experience through interconnected physical and digital technology.

“Technology upgrades implemented in a vacuum aren’t truly ‘smart,’ because they’re not grounded in the end-to-end guest experience,” says Sundaram, travel and hospitality industry expert.

Smart tourism is not just luxury travel; it applies to mass-market or affordable tourism experiences as well. Smart tourism creates seamless and luxurious experiences enabled by technology, increasing convenience and accessibility for travelers.

The next era of smart tourism, sometimes referred to as “cognitive tourism,” goes a step further by utilizing first-party customer data to proactively recommend the next step of the guest experience, whether that’s a reminder to get to the airport, an invitation for a vacation activity or a coupon for a recommended restaurant. This means no more written itineraries that need to be carried around and the ability to plan a dream vacation at the click of a button, taking much of the thinking out of the process.

Why guests crave smart destinations now more than ever

Post-COVID-19, travelers expect and rely on technology to power travel experiences across every touchpoint of their journey. Understaffed travel and hospitality brands need to use technology to bridge the gap at formerly in-person touchpoints that are becoming overwhelmed with “revenge tourism.”

But the need for smart tourism isn’t just because of a lack of staff. As travel prices continue to rise and loyalty falls, guests will revisit brands that personalize products and messaging. Almost one-third of travelers are more likely to stay in hotels that offer contactless checkout and/or personalized digital offers, according to 2022 research. Digitizing the travel experience allows brands to further tailor marketing and recommendations to customers based on their data.

Smart tourism also enables more sustainable, regenerative travel experiences that appeal to younger travelers. Roughly two-thirds of Millennials and Gen Z say that sustainability is important to them when they travel, according to the same study.

How can smart tourism transform the end-to-end travel experience?

From booking to hotel check-in and travel activities, brands can allow customers to share first-party data through mobile devices for more personalized and efficient travel experiences.

Here’s how brands can integrate customer data across each step of the travel experience:

Booking the vacation  

• Read blogs, forums and articles to research vacation options.
• Manually enter log-in information on several different websites to receive points and discounts on bookings.
• Fill out lengthy forms with contact information for each booking.
• Go to the brand website to enter a virtual metaverse experience to explore and learn about the destination.
• Scan a QR code from the website browser to give consent for the brand to automatically access all required booking credentials stored within a [decentralized digital identity], from payment information to contact information.
•  Receive personalized recommendations for travel based on metaverse activity and decentralized digital identity.

Checking in at the airport for a flight

• Enter the airport well in advance of the flight to stand in a long line to check bags.
• Check into flight via the website, and have to enter the flight number and remember to check in well in advance of the flight.
• Enter the long TSA line for security, and have to show your passport/ID and boarding pass.
• Airline app sends a notification to check in for your flight, and boarding information is automatically added to the app.
• App recommends what time to get to the airport based on traffic flow and locations and also shows recommendations for food around the gate area, allowing passengers to place orders for products or food in advance with stored payment methods.
• App allows passengers to check bags through a contactless method and use their phone to get through security and boarding with no queues.

Checking into a hotel for vacation

• Arrive at the front desk to wait in a long line.
• Front desk staff member has to check multiple databases to locate guest check-in information as the guest waits with their family and luggage.
• Guest has to juggle their ID and credit card and sign paper check-in forms and receives an envelope with room keys.
• Receive an email on the day of check-in with instructions on how to check in.
• Geo-sensing technology recognizes when you have reached the hotel property and sends a ping with the room information and room key.
• App guides visitors to their rooms and provides recommendations for initial food, activities and added amenities based on demographic information and travel history.

Accomplishing the travel itinerary

• Research and book the best activities near the hotel far in advance of the trip.
• Separately research and book the most convenient transportation and food options to accompany the activity.
• Check into each activity using a different ticket or pass, search deep in email inbox or print out the pass in advance.
• Receive a realistic recommended travel itinerary for the trip based on geo-location, preferences, demographics and other traveler information.
• In case of unanticipated events, the activities and overall itinerary are dynamic, with the ability to transition to new reservation times or plans depending on the situation.
• Receive proactive activity reminders for timing, transportation and necessary preparation.

In order to bring smart and even cognitive tourism experiences to life, travel brands need to connect physical and digital technology, as well as customer data, across the entire travel ecosystem. This includes city governments, payment processors, airports, airlines, hotels and more.

How Publicis Sapient creates smart destinations

Through partnerships with key industry players, Publicis Sapient helps global travel companies utilize artificial intelligence, big data, information of things, augmented and virtual reality and decentralized identity solutions to create connected travel ecosystems.

“Publicis Sapient is a global leader in smart destination solutions across geographies and sectors,” says Sundaram, travel and hospitality industry expert. “Our approach to smart tourism is customer-centric and involves a variety of stakeholders in order to be truly seamless.”

Approaching smart and cognitive tourism as an entire ecosystem rather than a singular touchpoint or brand in isolation allows hotels, airlines and cities to create frictionless and delightful travel experiences. At the same time, it creates experiences that are scalable over time and able to onboard and integrate new partners or hybrid legacy architecture.

Publicis Sapient helps brands like Miral to store every piece of information needed for travel in one place, digitally.

Contact Publicis Sapient to design and deliver a customer-centric smart tourism experience below.

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Related Reading

Entire Island Becomes a Smart Destination

Facial recognition allows guests to be contactless and connected across disparate customer attractions.

How to Build Your Smart Tourism Business Model

Consider the following steps to help craft smart travel experiences that are environmentally and economically sound.

The Latest in Digital Smart Destination Technology

Find out how to leverage existing and emerging technology to craft state-of-the-art experiences for travelers, residents and guests.

YouTube Premium upgrade adds smart downloads and picture-in-picture mode for Shorts

YouTube is adding several new features for Premium users, including smart downloads and support for picture-in-picture mode for Shorts, as well as a wider rollout of its “Jump Ahead” feature for navigating through videos.

The Google-owned video streaming platform already allows background play and picture-in-picture mode for long-form videos so you can consume content while browsing other apps. The company is now extending this support to Shorts, starting with users on Android.

YouTube is also adding a “Jump ahead” button, which appears when users double-tap to skip.

When users tap on the button, YouTube jumps to the best parts of the video. The company uses a combination of viewer data and machine learning to identify these parts. The feature has been in testing since last month, and now it is rolling it out to all Android users in the U.S., with an iOS rollout scheduled in the next few weeks.

YouTube is also adding new experimental features for a limited time.

One includes a conversational AI tool Google first tested last year , allowing users to ask the chatbot questions related to the video or request to watch suggested content. The company is now bringing that back for Android users in the U.S.

In addition, the video streaming platform is adding smart download support for Shorts. This means that, based on your recent Shorts viewing history, YouTube will automatically download some short videos for offline viewing. Apart from these features, YouTube is testing a redesigned watch page on the desktop.

Earlier this year, YouTube said that, across Premium and Music, it has more than 100 million paid users around the world.

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Smart tourism: where digitalization meets sustainability

Yes, traveling is a wonderful thing. But so is protecting the environment! Our  our Master’s student writes about his world trip and what sustainable choices are possible. His goal on his trip was clear: How can we combine the two? How can we travel more sustainably? Can we use smart technologies for our adventures around the world? A trip around the world was the experience of a lifetime. His 2019 journey around the globe started in beautiful Bern and took him on an adventure across six continents. For him, traveling and interacting with other cultures has always been a great passion and at the same time an eye-opener in terms of sustainability.

Today, more people than ever could afford to travel. But how can you travel smart? How can you help preserve the environment and sights and not inconvenience locals? Before the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism was booming like never before. According to the United Nations UNCTAD early indicators show that traveling and tourism is one of the most affected sectors by the pandemic. Their studies show that even with the introduction of vaccination, it will take a longer time for travel to return to pre-pandemic levels. So, it’s time to take advantage of this social pause in travel and look back at where smart technologies within travel have led to more sustainability. The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) calculated that 1.4 billion people traveled internationally in 2018, half of them in Europe.

But tourism doesn’t just bring good profits to a region or city. Places like Dubrovnik, Amsterdam, or Venice  struggle to cope with the massive influx of tourists . Some say apps like Airbnb or Booking.com are displacing local residents and turning entire cities into giant hotels. In addition, social media providers like Instagram are adding to our desire to visit remote and culturally rich sites and take home the best photos of them.

Fig. 1: Overtourism in Venice, Italy.

When there are more tourists than a particular place or landscape can handle, we talk about overtourism , which has negatively impacted the sustainability and environmental protection of travel again in recent years.

Are smart technologies the solution?

Can cutting-edge technology help make travel friendlier for visitors and locals? Lisa Kinne, smart travel expert from the German digital association Bitkom , says: Yes!

When it comes to tourism, digitalization has great potential to improve sustainability according the Bitkom studies . If it’s first about making information easily accessible, such as real-time data on tourist numbers, tourist flows in popular localities can be regulated more sustainably. Which would mean less overtourism. Another option is to link smart travel options together. This allows us to get from A to B more efficiently. With more and simpler travel information, tourists can consciously choose more sustainable travel solutions.

This is what makes tourism smarter these days. To me, this means taking advantage of the opportunities that digitalization offers us to minimize risks as much as possible and support sustainability.

Practical examples and hacks of smart traveling

For example, how to get to a destination. Services like www.ecopassenger.org help travelers compare different itineraries in terms of CO2 emissions. We also often used the train for our travels, and we were helped by the famous “man from seat 61” who runs an online blog about sustainable train travel on www.seat61.com .

Fig. 2: Ecopassenger.org supports the reduction of CO2 emissions.

Websites like www.myclimate.org calculate the environmental carbon footprint of our trip and convert it into the required CO2 offset of a flight. For instance, when we flew from São Paulo to Johannesburg, we were able to donate to a climate protection project in developing and emerging countries by compensating about 70 additional swiss francs.

The latter mentioned case of our trip shows that sustainability is not only an issue about emissions, but also about social sustainability – such as reforestation or education – which should be considered while traveling. For social sustainability, to give an instance, we traveled to Arequipa in Peru, to help within a social education project. The digital platform www.socialbnb.org , a useful example from the sharing economy, made this possible. Similarly exciting here is the provider www.fairbnb.coop , which uses commission money to support local projects.

The power of data, AI, and machine learning for more sustainable travels

It would be great if we could expand existing data networks and share more data regarding more sustainable travel with society. As travelers, we have the technologies at our fingertips to collect data and make it available to the travel community. As an illustration, let’s say we didn’t feel a travel deal was very sustainable. So, we can suggest a different offer to the community online and end up doing good by collecting data on more sustainable offers on an ongoing basis.

Through smart tourism, we can contribute further to science by providing data. Vacation snapshots taken can become part of a smart tourism data pool. Travelers can upload their photos online through a project of the Citizen Science Center at the University of Zurich and collect valuable data for research on coasts and animals. You wonder how it works?

Are you traveling to a coast or a beach and taking some snapshots of it? Travelers can nowadays upload their coastal photos on Coastwards or via coastwards app without login and provide the exact location of it. These images go into a global database and help scientists to better understand the risks of rising sea levels through artificial intelligence and machine learning models.

During our South Africa safaris, we got to observe one of the rarest and most endangered species in the wild: the wild dog. While there, we learned about the digital solution Wild Me. WildMe develops open software and artificial intelligence to support wildlife conservation. They use machine learning in the fight against the extinction of endangered species . This smart technology documents wildlife migration routes and trails.

Fig. 3: How Wild Me works through Microsoft Azure.

An animal with unique patterns like the South African wild dog is photographed by a traveler. The images are then posted to the cloud by users or through social media scans. Computer vision models use pattern recognition to identify the species and individual animals. Users can then track their favorite animals in a wildbook (gamification possible through a collaboration with Microsoft). The data collected helps scientists monitor endangered populations, animal interactions, and individual movements for the benefit of wildlife conservation.

Fig. 4: Wild Me AI technology combined with machine learning to protect South African wildlife.

Scientists aren’t the only ones who can benefit from this Big Data generation. Travelers like us do too. Tourists in the city of Hangzhou (China), for instance, are tracked via geo-tracking so that the city can inform visitors how crowded a place or attraction is, and this is possible about 2 hours in advance using predictive analysis.

Our trip around the world showed us impressively through these examples and digital hacks that digitalization is revolutionizing tourism and travel and that automated innovations can contribute to more sustainability.

Smart traveling – in a European role model

The UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) claims that smart cities are the best prepared  for reconciling sustainability and travel . In recent years, two cities have been named European smart tourism capitals for the first time. Lyon and Helsinki. The example of Helsinki (Finland) shows what smart traveling and, consequently, a Smart City can look like. You can start your trip to Helsinki completely digitally! In fact, anyone can visit and explore Helsinki virtually through VR technology and a VR headset .

In the future, it might even be possible to attend concerts and exhibitions virtually or go shopping in Helsinki virtually. Not everyone can afford to travel, or the pandemic situation currently prevents it. Through Helsinki’s VR technology, these hurdles can be overcome, and it offers the possibility to explore the city and various sights without flying or physically traveling . VR saves travel time and the associated CO2 emissions.

Those who still travel to Helsinki in person can filter the most sustainable food and exploration options via Myhelsinki . And then there’s the question of how to get from A to B sustainably in Helsinki? By metro or light rail, or by bike, or by taking the nearest ride-share? The app Whim (also available in Switzerland) allows you to search, book and pay for the different means of transport available in Helsinki. Within the app, the most sustainable route can be determined directly using the appropriate mode of transport. This makes the city much cleaner, more convenient and increases the quality of life for residents.

Fig. 5: Virtual Helsinki: a completely digital visit to Finland through VR.

Many of these initiatives are supported by the municipality to implement a better and more sustainable future, making Helsinki an example of a smart city for smart travelers.

This blog ends with the same statement it started: Yes, traveling is a wonderful thing. But so is protecting the environment! It will remain a big challenge for travelers, for cities or countries, and for society to make travel more sustainable. However, the digital solutions of our time and the associated power of data can help us promote sustainability during our travels. The associated community on more sustainable travel will grow, and at the same time more cities will be digitized into smart cities. The potential to travel more sustainably is great, and the next time we travel, digitalization will surely already be providing new opportunities.

So, let’s all take advantage of the technological developments of our time in travel, so that future generations can also explore and travel our planet in a sustainable state and its full beauty.

• COVID-19 and Tourism – An Update . United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2021. https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/ditcinf2021d3_en_0.pdf
• International Tourist Arrivals Reach 1.4 Billion Two Years Ahead Of Forecasts. World Tourism Organization UNWTO, 2019. https://www.unwto.org/global/press-release/2019-01-21/international-tourist-arrivals-reach-14-billion-two-years-ahead-forecasts
• “Tourists Go Home!” – Tourism Overcrowding And “Tourismophobia” In European Cities (Can Tourists And Residents Still Co-Habitate In The City?) , Egresi, I., 2018. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327883652_Tourists_go_home_-_Tourism_overcrowding_and_tourismophobia_in_European_cities_Can_tourists_and_residents_still_co-habitate_in_the_city
• Nationale Tourismusstrategie digital denken – Bitkom-Handlungsempfehlungen für den Tourismusstandort Deutschland. Kinne, L., 2020. https://www.bitkom.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/20200504_bitkom_positionspapier_nationale-tourismusstrategie-digital-denken.pdf
• Digitaler Tourismus 2020: So smart reisen die Deutschen. Paulsen, N., 2020. https://www.bitkom.org/Presse/Presseinformation/Digitaler-Tourismus-2020-So-smart-reisen-die-Deutschen
• The Amazing Ways Wild Me Uses Artificial Intelligence And Citizen Scientists To Help With Conservation . Marr, B., 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2021/01/29/the-amazing-ways-wild-me-uses-artificial-intelligence-and-citizen-scientists-to-help-with-conservation/?sh=449b4152dcdc
• Stadtentwicklung: Mit der App “Smart Cities» in die Zukunft. Euronews, 2019. https://de.euronews.com/next/2019/10/17/stadtentwicklung-mit-der-app-smart-cities-in-die-zukunft
• Helsinki’s huge VR gig hints at the potential of virtual tourism. Baxter, S., 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/may/05/helsinki-huge-vr-virtual-reality-gig-potential-virtual-tourism

About the Master Digital Administration

This article was written as part of the Master’s programme in Digital Business Administration at BFH Wirtschaft. The programme provides the relevant skills to help shape the digital future of business and society. Thanks to current live cases from companies in the digital transformation, the study programme is strongly practice-oriented and provides hands-on experience in the use of current and emerging digital technologies.

You can find more information here.

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Smart Tourism: The Future of the Sector is Technological

What is smart tourism, smart cities and tourism, artificial intelligence and tourism, smart tourism and 5g, examples of smart tourism, smart tourism applications.

Smart cities are booming and are positioned as the perfect option for future processes of massive urbanization and sustainable models that companies and government agencies are currently pursuing.

This new paradigm offers the tourism sector a wide range of business opportunities and new ways of creating value to its offer. We tell you what it consists of, what the role of technology will be, and its future forecasts.

Smart tourism is defined as the dynamic connection of human experiences with smart technologies. It is closely linked to the development of Smart Cities and goes hand in hand with improvements in technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, IoT , Big Data, or 5G.

The goal of smart tourism is to improve the efficiency of resource management, maximize competitiveness and enhance sustainability through the use of innovative technologies. Therefore, more and more destinations are joining this modernization of their operations, from payment methods to various interactive activities.

The Smart Cities boom is impacting many industries, and one of them is tourism, which is increasingly moving towards a smart destination model.

As I said above, the development of smart tourism goes hand in hand with the growth of Smart Cities. These cities aim to improve the quality of life of their inhabitants, in addition to creating more sustainable places. Therefore, smart tourism also follows these initiatives through richer and more environmentally friendly experiences.

Due to the importance of tourism as a strategic economic activity in many countries, this new way of traveling through cities is emerging. Some key points for the consolidation of smart tourism in a smart city are:

• State-of-the-art infrastructure guarantees sustainable development and promotes equitable accessibility.
• Access to free wifi in the street and public places.
• Electric mobility as an alternative to traditional transport.
• Promotion of more sustainable tourism.
• Real-time information such as traffic flow or incidents in public transport.
• Cultural and interactive activities.

Artificial Intelligence has numerous applications in the tourism sector, both from the consumer and business perspective. In the first case, it helps users find the most relevant information more quickly, gives them greater mobility, improves their decision-making and provides them with a better tourism experience.

For entrepreneurs, AI helps to manage resources, especially in promotion and productivity, and also to create a more sustainable model. Some of the most common examples are:

• Recommendation systems and personalization techniques: AI makes available to users the alternatives that suit them best, with personalized suggestions for each case and reducing the infinite number of options that do not always fit. Thanks to the information made available to companies, they can build precise profiles and tailor their experiences to each case.
• Conversational systems such as chatbots and voice assistants: These systems employ technologies such as NLP and speech recognition and are very useful because users can access them at any time through a closer experience that mimics the human one. In addition, with the use of chatbots, company workers no longer have to waste time on these types of tasks and can dedicate themselves to other more important ones.
• Forecasting tools: using historical and contextual data, future estimates are made to make better decisions. In the tourism sector, it is used to understand the tourist demand of each period and place, in order to develop marketing strategies, financial management, and allocation of human resources, detect scams or support the management of facilities.
• Translation applications: one of the bases of tourism is contact with different cultures and languages. However, it is also one of the biggest barriers for tourists when choosing a destination and avoiding sources of discomfort. Machine translation makes it easier for users to navigate each destination, allowing them to explore and participate in all kinds of activities.

Thanks to the development of 5G networks, new applications based on faster communication between devices will emerge.

When applied to tourism, we are referring to solutions that can be used by travel companies or cities to attract visitors through a more attractive experience.

Changes in this sector will focus on greater personalization of services, better access to information and content, quality entertainment, and optimized operations.

On the other hand, a fast internet connection can be a key factor in whether or not a guest returns to accommodation, especially when it is a business trip. 5G solves these problems, in addition to contributing to the implementation of smart features such as lights and thermostats that are controlled from a mobile device.

It is also a fundamental technology for the proper functioning of other technologies such as augmented reality. Many museums have already included experiences with tablets or glasses that gamify the traditional experience or live tours.

In fact, it will be a fundamental factor in airports, as this technology will be very present in passenger management or aircraft maintenance. Even solutions in which artificial intelligence plays a leading role, such as assisted vision, will also enter the market.

There are more and more examples of smart tourism destinations that we can find anywhere in the world. In fact, initiatives such as the European Capital of Smart Tourism have emerged, which aims to raise awareness of smart tourism tools, measures and projects implemented in cities in four categories: sustainability, digitization and cultural heritage, accessibility, and creativity.

We have compiled some of the most striking cases, but there are many more:

• El Hierro , in Spain, has become the first smart island in the world to achieve energy self-sufficiency, in addition to reducing its pollution levels thanks to the generation of electricity from garbage, or the replacement of brick with volcanic stone in the construction sector.
• Tequila , in the Mexican state of Jalisco, offers free wifi in its historic center, has an app containing information on products and services in the area, and has a data system that informs travelers in real time about traffic and commercial activities.
• The Swedish city of Gothenburg has implemented measures to ensure the well-being of future generations. It has published a smart map that encourages citizen participation to exchange, share or rent in the city. It also has a 3D model to conduct public consultations, anticipate the impact of future development and make improved decisions. On the other hand, 60% of its district heating is based on waste or recycled heat, making it one of the most sustainable European capitals.
• Malaga is the Spanish city that stands out most in terms of accessibility. It has installed LED street lighting and has created numerous kilometers of bicycle lanes, along with several rental stations. It has also installed smart irrigation systems in parks and gardens to save water and has implemented a plan to reduce air pollution, control pollen levels, and reduce noise.
• Ljubljana , the capital of Slovenia, has placed special emphasis on sustainability, and 20% of its territory is made up of protected natural areas, with a focus on converting degraded sites into public spaces. It has also promoted the purchase of local products in hotels and restaurants, in addition to creating a tourism website with a wide variety of content and applications focused on responsible tourism.
• Helsinki , the capital of Finland, has designed an intelligent public transport system that has received high praise. An “Uber boat” system is now being considered and driverless buses are being tested. In addition, multilingual workers can be found stationed at the city’s main attractions, offering assistance to visitors. It has also put a focus on electric transport and aims to become carbon neutral by 2035.
• Copenhagen , the Danish capital, has made great strides in digitalization. It has launched a visitor service, where tourists can see everything the city has to offer through moving billboards, robotics or virtual reality.
• Singapore is another example of digitalization, as it has implemented solutions that encourage the development of innovative communities. There, tourists have apps that inform them about crime rates in each specific area and receive notifications about missing persons and emergency institutions or information based on their geopositioning.

Smart tourism plays a crucial role in the development of smart cities, as its initiatives to attract tourists can cause a significant increase in people and vehicles. This affects traffic, in its congestion or in the difficulty of finding parking. This is why tourism and cities must work hand in hand to remedy these problems and provide a better experience for tourists and residents.

Dubai is another city that wanted to create an improved model for its inhabitants and offer a unique experience to its visitors. Therefore, it commissioned us to develop a project aimed at developing a totally innovative digital experience for the city.

We created a tool with which to manage high-resolution panoramic photos and videos, providing an automated processing and uploading system, in order to be available for viewing on a web application. You can discover all the details of Dubai 360 here.

On the other hand, with a special focus on sustainability, we created a solution for Trasmediterránea that reinforces passenger security, guarantees identity control, and increases the company’s environmental commitment by eliminating the need to print more than 5 million tickets per year.

We are specialists in creating innovative developments that transform the tourism sector towards a digitalized and interactive model. If you want to know how do not hesitate to contact us!

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Smart Tourism and Smart Destinations for a Sustainable Future

• Living reference work entry
• First Online: 09 June 2020
• Cite this living reference work entry

• Jorge Rocha 7  

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals ((ENUNSDG))

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2 Citations

Definitions

Sustainable tourism plans to meet the needs of the current generation and of the following ones as it tries to find the best way of using the resources available and, at the same time, ensuring the economic development. Smart tourism uses Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to improve tourists’ experience and enhancing local quality of life. It connects to the concept of smart destination, which applies ICT to support tourists on planning their journey and choosing their destination in a convenient and sustainable way.

Introduction

Tourism industry has been emerging as one outstanding way for enhancing economic development. In 2016, this industry supplied the world economy with US$8.8 TN (10.4% of worlds Gross Domestic Product) (WTTC 2019 ). Moreover, in 2015 the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) predicted that in 2030 nearly 1.8 billion people will travel in tourism, but in 2019 this number reached 1.6 billion, and now WTO predicts 2.5 billion...

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Jorge Rocha

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Center for Neuroscience & Cell Biology, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

Anabela Marisa Azul

Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Passo Fundo University Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Passo Fundo, Brazil

Luciana Brandli

HAW Hamburg, Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Amanda Lange Salvia

International Centre for Thriving, University of Chester, Chester, UK

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Dmitry Kurochkin

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© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Rocha, J. (2020). Smart Tourism and Smart Destinations for a Sustainable Future. In: Leal Filho, W., Azul, A., Brandli, L., Lange Salvia, A., Wall, T. (eds) Decent Work and Economic Growth. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71058-7_88-1

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71058-7_88-1

Received : 25 March 2020

Accepted : 16 April 2020

Published : 09 June 2020

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-319-71058-7

Online ISBN : 978-3-319-71058-7

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• Augmented Reality

These smart binoculars can identify thousands of stars and over a million landmarks

Unistellar is crowdfunding its new envision binoculars that use ar to overlay information about what you’re looking at..

By Andrew Liszewski , a senior reporter who's been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2011, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid.

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Unistellar’s new Envision binoculars bring smart functionality similar to Swarovski’s Optik AX Visio binoculars  announced earlier this year. But instead of recognizing birds and animals, the Envision will use AR to identify and label over a million unique landmarks including mountains and trails and more than 200,000 objects in the night sky.

The French company launched a decade ago with smart telescopes that automate the process of finding and photographing objects like stars and planets. It’s now squeezing that technology into a pair of binoculars featuring 50mm lenses from Nikon upgraded with an augmented reality projection system that overlays contextual information about what’s being viewed in real time.

It’s innovative, but Unistellar will be relying on a crowdfunding campaign to help create its first prototypes next year, and delivery to backers isn’t expected until late 2025.

The Envision binoculars connect to a smartphone over Bluetooth and use that device’s GPS and other sensors to determine where a user is located. With the help of an app, the smartphone also feeds the binoculars info from an online database featuring “millions of cartographic items, including mountains, hills, trails, landmarks, water sources, stars, galaxies, and other celestial objects.” For those headed to remote locations with limited connectivity, they’ll need to download offline maps and data ahead of time.

Battery life is rated at five hours of use or “1,000 binocular engagements per charge.” But when the battery dies, the Envision will continue to function as regular binoculars.

In addition to serving as a handheld tour guide, Unistellar is promising another handy feature: one person can lock onto something they’re looking at and then pass the binoculars to someone else, who will see directional indicators guiding them to that same target.

Unistellar is bringing the Envision binoculars to consumers through a crowdfunded Kickstarter campaign that’s still over $1 million shy of its funding goal. Early bird backers can preorder a pair for $699, which is a significant discount over the expected $1,199 retail pricing (and much cheaper than the $4,799 Swarovski smart binoculars), but delivery for the earliest backers isn’t expected until November 2025.

There’s always a risk when backing a crowdfunded product, even one from a company like Unistellar that’s already delivered several successful devices. But the company isn’t expecting to have its first industrial prototypes of the Envision binoculars until January 2025. Despite a solid track record so far, it might be a good idea to wait until next year to see how these pan out.

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President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday that 10 people, all civilians, have been returned to Ukraine from captivity in Russia and its ally Belarus.

Tasmania Is Hiring for a ‘Wombat Walker’ and Other Odd Jobs

The Australian island state is trying to drum up tourism during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter

Daily Correspondent

Searching for a new job? Tasmania is looking for curious, adventurous professionals to fill a wide array of unusual roles—including a “wombat walker,” who will be responsible for taking the stocky marsupials on their morning jaunts and feeding them snacks.

Tasmania has posted a series of “ odd jobs ” in a bid to boost tourism during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, which runs from June to August. All of the gigs are unpaid, though the local tourism board will cover the cost of travel, lodging and food.

“Do you crave a break from the rinse and repeat of the daily grind?” asks the wombat walker job description . “Swap your day job for an odd job: a uniquely Tasmanian experience designed to shake you by the shoulders and wake you up to the wonders of winter.”

The gigs are designed to offer “creative stimulation; connection to local communities, culture and nature; and making things with your own two hands,” per Tourism Tasmania.

“The stuff that makes us feel alive,” the tourism board adds.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Tasmania (@tasmania)

But don’t start updating your resume just yet. Unfortunately, the positions are only open to adults currently residing in Australia. Still, the job descriptions are entertaining to read—and, as intended, they highlight some of what makes Tasmania special.

Wombats, for instance, are stocky animals native to Australia. As marsupials , female wombats carry their young in pouches for about six months after giving birth. While newborn wombats are only about 0.5 inches long , they measure about three feet long as adults. They are known for being quite cute; a few years ago, one Tasmanian island started asking tourists to pledge not to chase them around or try to pick them up.

The wombat walker will work for just one day at a wildlife park in Bicheno, a town on Tasmania’s east coast. This worker will be responsible for tasks such as “[coaxing the wombats] out of bed to get them moving” and “motivating them to complete their morning walks.”

Meanwhile, the “ truffle snuffler ” gig involves hanging out with trained truffle dogs as they search for black winter truffles among oak trees. The successful candidate will also have a chance to taste the delicacies “to ensure they meet the highest standards,” per the listing.

The person who snags the role of “ paranormal investigator ” will be required to spend the night inside the maximum-security ward at Willow Court, one of the oldest asylums in Australia. While there, the investigator will use “the latest ghost-hunting equipment” to help document any unexplained disturbances.

The Australian island state is also looking for a “ wine whisperer ,” a “ cave conductor ,” an “ oyster organizer ” and a “ sauna stoker ,” among other roles.

Tasmanian officials launched the odd jobs initiative to drum up publicity and help tourism rebound to pre-pandemic levels. In 2019, Tasmania saw 1.35 million visitors, compared with 1.25 million last year, per  BBC News ’ Anna Lamche.

During this time of year, the climate in Tasmania can get quite chilly, with highs ranging from the 30s to the 50s.

“As temperatures drop during winter, we know Australians are seeking a well-being boost,” says Lindene Cleary, Tourism Tasmania’s chief marketing officer, to the Australian publication Mediaweek ’s Alisha Buaya.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.

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Prosecutors seek 8-month rehabilitation for Australian man charged with drug possession in Bali

Firdia Lisnawati

Associated Press

Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Australian Troy Smith, who is accused of drug possession, sits in a courtroom for his trial at Denpasar district court, Bali, Indonesia on Thursday, June 27, 2024. Indonesian police arrested Smith on April 30 after he was allegedly caught with methamphetamine in his hotel. (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati)

DENPASAR – Prosecutors in Indonesia on Thursday demanded an eight-month medical rehabilitation for an Australian man charged with possessing methamphetamine on the tourist island of Bali, after his earlier charge of drug trafficking was dropped which would have carried the death penalty.

Troy Andrew Smith, from Port Lincoln in South Australia, was arrested on April 30 after police raided his hotel in Legian, a popular tourist spot near Kuta Beach, and seized 3.15 grams (0.1 ounce) of crystal methamphetamine inside a toothpaste container from his room. Police found a further 0.4 grams of the drug, along with a bong and a lighter in his desk drawer.

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The arrest followed a tip that Smith had received a suspicious package containing toothpaste by mail from Australia. Under Indonesia’s tough drug laws, he faces up to 12 years in prison if found guilty.

During the trial that began two weeks ago, the 49-year-old accountant told the court that he ordered the drugs from a man in Australia three weeks before his arrest and that he regretted his actions and apologized.

He said that he had used meth routinely daily to reduce depression and anxiety since 2020.

Authorities reduced the initial charge of drug trafficking, which carries a possible death penalty, to the less serious charge of drug use after a police drug assessment team determined he was a drug user.

At a sentencing hearing on Thursday, the lead prosecutor Isa Ulinnuha said in Denpasar District Court that although Smith “violated anti-narcotics laws and his action was contrary to the government’s program in eradicating narcotics,” he showed leniency because Smith repeatedly expressed remorse and bought the drugs for personal use.

“He was not involved in illicit narcotics trafficking and was a drug user in the moderate category,” Ulinnuha told the court, “Therefore, we demanded that he undergo inpatient medical rehabilitation for eight months.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disrespect the laws in Indonesia,” Smith told the court after prosecutors read out their demand.

The trial has been adjourned until July 4 for a verdict.

Smith’s Australian legal consultant, John McLeod, said his legal team had tried to push for a six-month medical rehabilitation sentence rather than a prison term. However, if judges grant the prosecutor’s demand, “We won’t be appealing, I don’t think so.”

Ida Bagus Gumilang Galih Sakti, one of Smith’s lawyers, said that he was “already happy” with the prosecutors who only demanded a rehabilitation for Smith to the court.

“I really hope if the decision is going to be less than eight months of (rehabilitation period),” he said, “But my focus now, our client can cure his addiction in recovery session instead of stay in the jail.”

Indonesia has very strict drug laws and convicted traffickers can be executed by a firing squad. More than 150 people are on death row, mostly for drug crimes, and about a third of them are foreigners.

Eighteen people convicted of drug-related offenses have been executed under current President Joko Widodo, who took office in 2014.

Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Found in Florida: This Marion tourist attraction features wildlife, glass-bottom boats and more

Insiders, did you get it right.

Miia Ollesh , Research director

Silver Springs State Park is an eco-tourism highlight on any adventurer’s list.

With its long history, Silver Springs is believed to be the state’s first tourist attraction.

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Today visitors can ride glass-bottom boats, rent kayaks, and check out its abundance of wildlife. From gators, turtles, birds, fish and manatees, its monkeys are perhaps the most unique animal at the park.

Learn more about monkeys in our great state here.

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Miia ollesh, related stories, found in florida: what thing is attached to this wing, found in florida: a wall for all.

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Asia Pacific Academy of Science Pte. Ltd. (APACSCI) specializes in international journal publishing. APACSCI adopts the open access publishing model and provides an important communication bridge for academic groups whose interest fields include engineering, technology, medicine, computer, mathematics, agriculture and forestry, and environment.

Focus and Scope

Smart Tourism (ST, eISSN: 2810-9821) is an open-access peer-reviewed journal. ST publishes articles that promote tourism management, tourism service, tourism marketing, etc. Smart methods talked about in this journal cover modern intelligent technologies, innovative ideas and practices, and pioneering policies. All of these methods and technologies should be conducive to promoting tourism development, boosting the tourism economy, enhancing the tourist experience, and ensuring tourism sustainability. This journal aims to inspire new ideas on policy formulation, the prosperity of villages, cultural protection, etc.

The journal welcomes all relevant submissions of research articles, brief reports, perspectives, reviews, etc., which make constructive contributions to theory, technology, and methods. Articles related to new technologies for tourism are extremely welcomed.

The topics of the journal include, but are not limited to:

• Tourism sustainability
• Tourism service
• Tourism marketing
• Tourism management
• Tourism policies
• Tourism facilities
• Tourism security
• Tourism platforms
• Tourism recommendation systems
• Tourism perception
• Cultural relic protection detection systems

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APACSCI upholds the spirit of strict adherence to high ethical standards. This is consistent with APACSCI's mission of publishing high-quality articles and promoting open scientific exchanges globally. APACSCI follows the  Ethical Oversight Guidelines  of the Committee on Publication Ethics ( COPE ) in overseeing the publication process, as well as the activities of APACSCI journals, editors, and reviewers.

APACSCI and all the editors adhere to the following guidelines:

1.  Core Practices  and  Best Practice Guidelines  of the  Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) ;

2.  Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing  developed by the  Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) ,  Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ ),  Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) ,  and  World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) .

3.  Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals  from the  International Committee of Medical Journals Editors (ICMJE) .

APACSCI is committed to protecting the privacy of its contributors and promises not to disclose personal information to third parties without permission, unless for necessary purposes of the publishing process or required by law.

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APACSCI takes allegations of misconduct (refer to the  Misconduct Policy  for more details) seriously and will launch an immediate investigation by a group of investigation members. Decisions will be made by the investigation group based on clear evidence, and the authors will be informed. If there is any appeal against the decision, it must be made to the publisher within 14 days of the decision date, or else actions will be taken after 14 days. The decision on the appeal is final.

Authors can express concerns about delays, extensions, and unreasonable handling procedures during the editing process and the time it takes. The editor-in-chief will be accountable for initiating an investigation into the issue, and the complainant will receive feedback. Reasonable editing procedures will be enhanced.

Any complaints and appeals against APACSCI journals and editors can be directed to the publisher at  [email protected] , and APACSCI follows  COPE  guidelines in handling all complaints and appeals.

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Authors should read the " Author Guidelines " before making a submission, and make sure that the manuscripts were written in accordance to the style and specifications of the journal's policy.

All manuscripts submitted to this journal are subject to rigorous peer review. Prior to the peer review process, the manuscripts will be screened for acceptable English language, novelty and relevance to the  Focus and Scope  of the journal.

Any manuscripts submitted to this journal will be treated as confidential materials. The manuscripts will not be disclosed to anyone except individuals such as editorial staff, reviewers and editors who participate in the initial screening, review, processing and preparation of the manuscript for publication (if accepted).

A manuscript would not be accepted if it has been published or is currently under consideration for publication in any other journals. The authors are required to notify the editorial team if the findings and data in their submissions have been presented in conferences.

Conflict of Interest

Authors are required to declare any potential conflicts of interest (financial or non-financial) during the submission stage. Any agreements with study sponsors (for-profit or non-profit), such as those that interfere with the authors' access to the study's data or with the authors' ability to analyze or interpret the data and to publish manuscripts independently according to their own decision, should be avoided by authors at all costs.

APACSCI also requires reviewers and editors to declare any (potential) non-financial conflicts of interest and declare any unpaid roles or relations that may influence the decision on the manuscript's publication before acknowledging the assigned request. These include, but are not limited to, unpaid roles in a governmental or non-governmental organization, unpaid roles in an advocacy or lobbying organization, and unpaid advisory positions in a commercial organization.

In addition, reviewers and editors must disclose any association that poses a conflict of interest in connection with the manuscript, including but not limited to those interferes with, or could reasonably be perceived as interfering with, the full and objective presentation, peer review, editorial decision-making, or publication of research or non-research articles submitted to a journal. Examples are personal or work-related relationships with one of the authors or the reviewer is on the authors' avoidance list.

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Following  COPE guidelines , APACSCI will not accept any misconduct behaviors that may mislead researchers.

Plagiarism is not acceptable. Using the content from one's own previously published articles without proper citation is also considered plagiarism. APACSCI adopts Crossref Similarity Check (powered by iThenticate) for checking the originality of submissions. Manuscripts with a high similarity index may be rejected.

Fabrication and falsification

Fabrication and falsification of data or images will mislead researchers. APACSCI strongly opposes such practices and will reject suspicious submissions.

Duplicate submission

Duplicate submission of a manuscript that has been published or submitted to other journals at the same time will not be considered.

Manipulation

Peer review manipulation is expressly forbidden. In particular, peer review manipulation by editors involves ethical issues, and when detected or complained about, editors are dealt with seriously and are subject to dismissal.

Eliminate excessive manipulative citation included in the peer review process by reviewers. Reviewers are encouraged to suggest that authors add references that are necessary and constructive to the research. Reviewers' own articles that do not contribute to the scholarly content of the author's work must not be oversold for the sole purpose of inflating the number of citations to the reviewer's own article.

Authors are prohibited from over-citing their own previously published articles. The journal's editorial board will determine self-citation thresholds, which authors must strictly adhere to in order to eliminate any suspicion of citation manipulation.

Editors will be involved in the journal management process to detect citation manipulations from authors or reviewers.

As behaviors above are illegal academic and very unethical, the Publisher will deal with it seriously. If any misconduct action is verified, authors and their institutions will be informed, and all the journals of the Publisher will not receive any new submission from these authors and their institutions  in three years. If the allegations are disputable, their institutes are responsible to cooperate with the journal in investigating allegations.

If there are any suspicious allegations of the processing of articles especially the peer review process, referring to For Reviewers , the Editor-in-Chief will receive the complaint, and an investigation group will be formed to investigate the entire process, including the reviewers, editors, and staff who are involved. The journal will follow the procedures described in  COPE  and  Publishing Ethics  for handling allegations of misconduct.

Correction, Retraction and Withdrawal

Authors are responsible for approving the final version of their manuscript and they should avoid any errors prior to publishing. In the case of errors that occur in a published article and have no influence on research results, APACSCI will issue a correction/erratum.

Authors, readers, and editors are encouraged to report any errors found in published papers. Please contact the editorial office of the particular journal.

Based on  COPE guidelines , the following conditions can lead to the retraction of a published article:

• Unreliable findings
• Published elsewhere without proper attribution to previous sources, disclosure to the editor, permission to republish, or justification
• Containing material or data without the authorization for use
• Infringement of copyright, violation of privacy, or other legal issues
• Unethical research
• Dubious peer review processes
• Failing to disclose a major competing interest

If any of the above misconduct proved to be true, a retraction notice will be issued with the reason, while the PDF of the retracted article will be watermarked with "Retracted". The journal editors will inform the authors of the retraction.

Paid Article Processing Charges will not be refunded to the authors if retraction occurs.

Although not encouraged, authors can initiate the withdrawal of their submission before and during the peer review process by providing the reason. However, authors should note that a penalty fee of US$200 will be imposed for the withdrawal of a submission undergoing the peer review process due to the spent efforts on the evaluation of the manuscript by the editors and reviewers. Upon the approval of submission withdrawal, the submission will be removed from the journal's operation system, and the authors be informed.

Accepted articles and articles in press may also be withdrawn due to infringements of professional ethical codes (similar reasons to those for retraction).

The language of all manuscripts must be English (either British or American) and non-English words should be used sparingly. Poor English may lead to article rejection. Authors are encouraged to seek language polishing by a native English speaker or a professional editing service.

Preprint policy

APACSCI allows authors to post preprints of the manuscript of their original research articles (limited to only this type of article) on community preprint servers, such as arXiv, bioRxiv, and PeerJ Preprint, prior to or simultaneous with their manuscript submission to APACSCI journals. Authors retain the copyright of the manuscript posted on a preprint server.

Authors should inform the editors of the preprint version of their submitted manuscript in a cover letter, as well as provide any associated accession numbers or DOIs. Revised versions per the result of the peer review process and accepted versions for publication should not be posted on a preprint server.

Upon publication of the article, APACSCI encourages authors to link the article in the preprint server to the journal site, so as to guide readers to access and refer to the final version of the article.

Based on the guidelines of the  International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) , authorship should be limited to those who meet the following four criteria:

• Contributed substantially to the conception or design of the manuscript or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the manuscript; AND
• Drafted the manuscript or reviewed it critically for significant intellectual content; AND
• Have final approval of the version to be published; AND
• Agreed to be responsible for the manuscript in ensuring that problems relating to the accuracy or completeness of any part of the manuscript are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Individuals who do not meet the above four criteria should not be listed as authors but should be acknowledged. All authors are expected to make meaningful contributions to this work. The publisher strictly prohibits false authorships, including those obtained through purchase, and only recognizes genuine contributions. Authors should disclose whether artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted technologies were used in the preparation of their manuscripts and how they used them. Authors should also report the use of AI for writing assistance in the Acknowledgment section. AI tools should not be used in sections that rely on human intellectual analysis, such as data interpretation and conclusion summarization.

A corresponding author should be marked with "*", and the maximum of corresponding authors is two. A corresponding author serves as a representative of the authors and is responsible for contacting editors and reviewers, e.g., submitting manuscripts, responding to reviews, accepting queries, proofreading galleys, making corrections, etc. 

Changes to Authorship

Authorship changes (addition, deletion, or rearrangement of author names) should be made before the acceptance of the manuscript. Confirmation from all authors (including existing authors and author(s) to be added and/or removed) should be provided to the editorial office of the journal, together with the reason for such changes. Changes can be made after the approval of the journal. The publisher will deal with any changes or dispute over authorship following the  COPE flowcharts of authorship and contributorship .

Copyright and License

Authors contributing to APACSCI journals retain the copyright .

All articles published by  Smart Tourism  are licensed under the Creative Commons International Licenses. Without any explicit request from the corresponding author during the submission stage, a paper will be published under the  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)  by default. Authors who would like to publish their work under the  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) , they should express their request during the submission stage. Please include the statement below in the "Comments for the Editor column" on the submission page:

The contributors or authors for this submission entitled "[MANUSCRIPT TITLE]", i.e. [NAMES of ALL AUTHORS], have given their consents to alter the Creative Commons License to *CC BY-NC 4.0* under which this submission will be published in   Smart Tourism .

It is the responsibility of authors to obtain permission to reuse material previously published under a more restrictive license from the copyright holder before the submission stage. These may include figures, tables, and schemes.

Advertising Policy

The publisher requests that this journal only consider advertising applications that are relevant to the contents of the journal, if available.

• The publisher (APACSCI) reserves the right to accept or refuse advertising. The Journal Editorial Office will evaluate whether to accept the request.
• Advertisements must comply with relevant rules and laws in the country where they will appear.
• Advertisements should be legible and advertisers identifiable. Sponsors may not arrange or influence editorial decisions including any content in the journal.
• Advertisements must not be misleading or deceptive. Advertising content must not contain indecent, offensive, or sensitive information (such as politics, ethnicity, gender, religion, etc.).
• APACSCI disclaims responsibility for any damages resulting from advertisements in its journals. The publisher or journal does not accept advertisements for products or services known to be harmful to health/science or contrary to academic principles.
• Unless the advertiser requests differently, all advertisements posted by the publisher will be displayed at random. Special requests need to be addressed to the publisher, who will make a final decision on a case-by-case basis within 7 working days.
• Advertising is independent, with journal web features and academic content free from all advertising and product interference.
• Once an advertisement is posted online, it will be removed from the journal's website at any time if the Editor-in-Chief or publisher requests that it be removed.

For any advertisement queries or appeals/complaints, please contact APACSCI at  [email protected] .

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

APACSCI's publishing model is open access. Open access enables readers to freely access and download articles immediately after publication online. APACSCI charges authors article processing charges (APCs) so as to cover operation costs, such as those arising from the evaluation and production processes. APCs should be paid upon the acceptance of articles and ahead of publication.

APCs of  Smart Tourism  are  US$800 .

Waiver and Discount Policy

APACSCI believes there should be no barriers to the dissemination of knowledge, and thus APACSCI offers APC waivers and discounts to authors from  low-income  countries and authors with special circumstances. Authors should write to the editorial office of the specific journal to apply for waivers and discounts. The decision to approve such applications is made by the editorial office on a case-by-case basis.  Publishing fees or waiver status should not influence editorial decision making.

Indexing & Archiving

• All the articles published online will be archived in  Portico  for long-term digital preservation.
• Authors are encouraged to self-archive the final version of their published articles into institutional repositories (such as those listed in the  Directory of Open Access Repositories ).
• Authors are also encouraged to use the final PDF version published on the website of  Smart Tourism .

Smart Tourism  has been indexed and archived in National Library Board of Singapore, ROAD, Scilit, GoogleScholar, Crossref, and  EuroPub,  and the journal aims to be included in the first-class academic databases in the world, such as WoS, Scopus, Inspec, and EI.

Researchers using an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool/service to directly generate the manuscript text must provide clear disclosures and statements, otherwise it will be considered academic misconduct. The journal allows the use of an AI tool/service for text embellishment and automatic sorting of references, but does not recommend the use of the AI tool/service in the thinking and concluding sessions of human involvement such as data analysis and interpretation, opinion hypothesis and conclusions, and the AI tool/service cannot fulfill the role of a textual author. If any part of the manuscript was written using an AI tool/service, it must be described openly, transparently, and in detail in the Methods or Acknowledgments section, for example:

"In the preparation of this work, the authors used the [name of the specific AI tool/service] to [purpose of use: e.g., literature research/text embellishment, etc.]. After using this tool/service, the authors reviewed and edited the content as needed, and take full responsibility for the content of the publication."

Units of Measurement

Smart Tourism  adopts and follows the rules of  International System of Units (SI)  for physical quantities and units of measurement. For example:

• Quantities including time, length, mass, electric current, etc., should be written as s (second), m (metre), kg (kilogram), A (ampere) after metric numbers.
• Adopt unified format for the same unit of measurement.

Section Collection Policy

The Section Collection program has been driven by APACSCI for a new chance to run an open access journal. This program aims to collect multidisciplinary topics, and concentrate authors from diverse research fields to focus on a special theme. It is great attempt to develop new ideas and applications. Section editorial team is composed of many scientists whose research fields covering various interests. They all supervise the implementation of the program, and the editorial process must comply with  editorial policies  of the journal.

A Section Collection is usually launched by an expert with great trust among peers and invited by the Editorial Office, or scholars could apply a section collection. Section Editors are representatives focusing on a theme from multidisciplinary topics. They have different research background, and gather to initiate new ideas and collaborations. Great responsibilities of Section Editors include:

• Preparing the title, summary, keywords, submission deadline, etc.
• Preparing a potential contributors' list.
• Suspecting and contributing to the editorial progress, including but not limited to the initial screening, and the peer-reviewed process.

  Workflow of Section Collection

Manuscripts should be submitted to Open Journal Systems (OJS) and go through a double-blinded peer-reviewed process (refer to  Peer Review Policy ).

Research Data Policy

According to the  data and reproducibility  of COPE, APACSCI encourages authors to share associated data, code, and materials, register clinical trials, and use standardized guidelines to achieve greater transparency, replicability, and trust in scientific findings. Thus, authors are encouraged to deposit datasets in a data repository; the premise is that this data is not suitable for submission as online supplementary files. Authors who have deposited raw data in community database repositories are encouraged to include a data availability statement in their manuscript. The statement should provide information about the availability of the research data and any limitations or conditions associated with accessing the data, except for reasonable controls related to human privacy or biosecurity. Reusing scientific data can offer great potential for further scientific and economic development.

• Data sharing

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• Front Psychol

Tourism Experience and Construction of Personalized Smart Tourism Program Under Tourist Psychology

1 Faculty of International Tourism and Management, City University of Macau, Macao, China

Qijun Huang

2 Faculty of Law, Hebei University, Baoding, China

3 School of Public Economics and Administration, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China

Xiuming Guan

4 School of Business, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macao, China

5 Department of Environmental Art and Design, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China

Ziyan Cheng

Associated data.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

The present work aims to boost tourism development in China, grasp the psychology of tourists at any time, and provide personalized tourist services. The research object is the tourism industry in Macau. In particular, tourists' experiences are comprehensively analyzed in terms of dining, living, traveling, sightseeing, shopping, and entertaining as per their psychological changes using approaches including big data analysis, literature analysis, and field investigation. In this case, a model of tourism experience formation path is summarized, and a smart travel solution is proposed based on psychological experience. In the end, specific and feasible suggestions are put forward for the Macau tourism industry. Results demonstrate that the psychology-based smart travel solution exerts a significant impact on tourists' tourism experience. Specifically, the weight of secular tourism experience is 0.523, the weight of aesthetic tourism experience is 0.356, and the weight of stimulating tourism experience is 0.121. Tourists prefer travel destinations with excellent urban security and scenic authenticity. They give the two indexes comprehensive scores of 75.14 points and 73.12 points, respectively. The proposed smart travel solution can grasp the psychology of tourists and enhance their tourism experiences. It has strong practical and guiding significances, which can promote constructing smart travel services in Macau and enhancing tourism experiences.

While China's national strength is improving continuously, people's requirements for the quality of life also becomes higher, and tourism expenditure has increased its share of all living consumption expenditures (Sun et al., 2020 ). Tourism is an important indicator to measure the happiness and life satisfaction of people; it also reflects the level of living standards. In China, the central government proposed a strategic plan for the development of smart tourism in 2011 (Watson et al., 2017 ). Supported by the national tourism policy, many smart tourism cities have emerged one after another. The key to smart tourism is to integrate tourism data, including traffic, weather, management, passenger flow, and other data that need to be integrated and considered (Gretzel et al., 2015 ). Before tourists leave for their destinations, various types of consultation, navigation, and information-sharing services are very critical. As the internet advances, applying new information technology to the tourism industry has become a general trend; as a result, data of the tourism industry has become a hot issue (Alaei et al., 2019 ). Big data technology is developed on the basis of information technologies, including the internet and cloud computing. This technology plays a vital role in developing tourism products, improving tourism services, and tourism marketing (Lv et al., 2019 ). A smart tourism service platform is built according to the data of the tourism industry to provide tourists with diversified services and make the tourism experience more personalized and authentic. This model is of great significance for promoting the transformation, upgrading, and sustainable development of the tourism industry.

The smart tourism is centered on the personalization of tourists. Supported by the new generation of communication and internet technologies, smart tourism increases interactive experience, gathers tourism information, and promotes the upgrading and transformation of the tourism industry (Skavronskaya et al., 2020a ). The research on psychology-based tourism experience focuses on the travel psychology and preferences of tourists. Analyzing several reports on tourism psychology, Cicerali et al. ( 2017 ) found that the most critical factors that harmed tourism satisfaction among tourism environmental factors were sanitary conditions, social influence, scenic area design, and tourism atmosphere. Studying the negative psychology of tourists, Nawijn and Biran ( 2019 ) discovered that different types of negative emotions would affect the lives of consumers, while traveling could promote the emotional experiences and improve the negative emotions. Skavronskaya et al. ( 2020b ) proposed a conceptual model called “cognitive evaluation of novelty in unforgettable tourism experience.” They believed that future works should consider applying this model to advance the tourism experience and analyze such experience as a psychological phenomenon. However, the existing methods cannot solve the problems hindering the sustainable development of tourism fundamentally. Therefore, constructing a smart tourism platform based on tourists' psychology is a critical and urgent issue in the tourism industry.

Therefore, influencing factors of the smart tourism industry are analyzed to clarify the specific evaluation indexes. Besides, three tourism experiences, namely secular tourism experience, aesthetic tourism experience, and stimulating tourism experience, are analyzed from six perspectives: dining, living, traveling, sightseeing, shopping, and entertaining. At last, a personalized smart tourism platform founded on tourism psychology is proposed. Through simulation experiments, the platform's effectiveness is validated; on this basis, countermeasures and suggestions are put forward for constructing the smart tourism of Macau. To sum up, a smart tourism platform is built using data mining technology, which can promote the smart tourism development in Macau and provide a basis for the sustainable development of Macau's tourism industry.

Literature Review

Related works of smart travel.

Smart travel uses new technologies such as cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) to actively perceive information about tourism resources, tourism economy, tourism activities, and tourists through the internet or mobile internet using portable terminal internet devices. It then timely releases the perceived information, allowing people to access the information they need in time to arrange their schedules. Eventually, intelligent perception and convenient use of all kinds of travel information can be achieved (Kharisma and Muni, 2017 ). Smart travel can be reflected in tourism management, tourism services, and tourism marketing. When people propose the concept of smart travel, they put forward various thoughts on smart travel as per different research directions (Cui and Long, 2019 ). Li et al. ( 2017 ) believed that smart travel was a unique creative tourism. Liberato et al. ( 2018 ) thought that smart travel was first a change in the concept of development. Buhalis ( 2019 ) pointed out that smart travel was an integration of the new generation of information and communication technologies. Femenia-Serra and Neuhofer ( 2018 ) researched the development momentum of smart travel regarding its driving factors. Thakuriah et al. ( 2020 ) introduced the relationship between smart city and smart travel and expounded the role of smart travel from multiple angles. Shafiee et al. ( 2019 ) introduced the history, framework, value, and development trend of smart travel. Gretzel and de Mendonça ( 2019 ) explained the deficiencies of smart travel. Sun et al. ( 2019 ) researched smart travel according to the current situation and problems, development countermeasures, and development prospects. Gretzel and Koo ( 2021 ) proposed to build and manage a “smart travel public service platform.” Smart travel is a significant innovation in the tourism industry. Its innovation path is formed based on the efficient flow and effective integration of tourism information in the tourism industry. The innovative means include the internet, big data, cloud computing, and other new-generation information technologies, as well as business model innovation. Ultimately, the purpose of innovation is to improve tourism services and tourists' satisfaction.

Development and Application of Big Data

Big data refers to a collection of data whose content cannot be captured, managed, and processed with conventional software tools within a time frame. Big data technology can quickly obtain valuable information from various types of data. Technologies applicable to big data include massively parallel processing databases, data mining grids, distributed file systems, distributed databases, cloud computing platforms, the internet, and scalable storage systems (Le et al., 2019 ). Lately, new technologies such as IoT, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing have been accepted in various fields. Chen et al. ( 2019 ) believed that these new things were inseparable from the support of big data. A large number of research results have also emerged in the process of assisting in the transformation and upgrading of various industries (Chen et al., 2019 ). Zhu et al. ( 2019 ) proved that combining big data and cloud computing could give new value to the data held by operators. Liu et al. ( 2020 ) suggested that big data could bring new ideas to the operation and management of the hotel industry. Du et al. ( 2020 ) believed that big data would contribute to tourism management and the development of global tourism. As mobile internet and big data develop rapidly, research on smart travel has gone beyond the theoretical level; scholars begin to combine smart travel with big data and cloud computing to explore a way to practice smart travel (Du et al., 2020 ). Joubert et al. ( 2021 ) studied the operation mode of smart travel by combining value chain management, supply chain management, and other operation management theories. Gao ( 2021 ) improved the practicability of smart travel by studying the technical implementation methods behind smart travel. They also explored the combination of smart travel and rural tourism from different angles.

Related Works of Tourism Psychology

People participating in tourism activities include actual tourists, potential tourists, and various practitioners of the tourism industry. They have different psychological activities in tourism activities and therefore behave differently (Skavronskaya et al., 2020c ). There are always contacts and connections among tourists, “tourism products,” tourism service personnel, and tourism enterprise management personnel in tourism activities. These mutual contacts and interpersonal relationships depend on people's psychological activities. Tourism psychology studies the laws of these people's psychological activities and behaviors in tourism activities. Psychological activities and behaviors are inseparable. Psychology governs behavior, and behavior reflects psychology (Kesenheimer and Greitemeyer, 2021 ). Tourism experience is a comprehensive experience based on super-utilitarian experience. While enjoying this experience, tourists can obtain aesthetic pleasure by observing the scenery, appreciate a colorful life in the interaction with others, discover and develop themselves in the process of actively imitating other roles, and also relish secular pleasures through tourism consumption.

A Review of Related Works

Related works analyzed above suggest that research results of big data, smart travel, and platform operation are very rich after decades of exploration. These findings provide important ideas and methods for designing smart travel platforms and operating systems based on big data, laying a firm theoretical foundation. However, previous works rarely discuss how to give full play to the important role of big data in global tourism, how to build a new model of smart travel platform operation, how to promote the development of the modern tourism service industry, and how to adapt to the upgrade of tourism consumption needs (Elizabeth et al., 2021 ). Smart travel is not just the internetization of the traditional tourism industry that is common in the current “Internet +” era, such as “Internet + travel e-government,” “Internet + travel e-commerce,” and “smart scenic spots.” New issues often appear during development, which must be solved through new technologies.

Regarding new demands and new problems, the deep integration of modern big data technology and traditional tourism has created a new operation model for tourism platforms, called smart travel. Because of the differences in tourism informatization and smart travel research worldwide, domestic and foreign tourists have big differences in tourism behaviors; in particular, domestic tourists pay more attention to sightseeing, while foreign tourists pay more attention to leisure. Therefore, there are different tendencies toward smart travel research. For example, the research on smart travel in foreign academia is biased toward the tourism informatization. In contrast, coincided with the explosion of innovation in China due to the demographic dividend, the domestic academia focuses on defining smart travel from different aspects, such as the theory of management changes derived from the research on how information technology affect the management of tourism enterprises, the theory of technology application derived from directly applying information technology to the tourism industry, and the theory of how information technology affects the tourism experience from the perspective of tourists. However, most of these works focus on researching the concepts of smart travel; the essence of smart travel is rarely discussed, and the research on the relationship between big data and smart travel and studies taking smart travel as the core are seldom reported, which can hardly reference the actual smart travel practice.

Methodology

Swot analysis of tourism industry in macau.

SWOT analysis discusses the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the research object to formulate policies accordingly (Peng, 2019 ). As the leading industry in Macau, tourism plays a significant role in coordinating and consolidating Macau's economic development. Through the SWOT analysis, the advantages and opportunities of Macau's tourism industry can be utilized to make improvements; meanwhile, the disadvantages and deficiencies encountered in the developmental process can be adjusted and upgraded.

Strengths Analysis

(1) Macau is located between Hong Kong and Guangdong Province, China. During its development, Macau can take advantages of Hong Kong's convenient seaport transportation and international background, as well as Guangdong's rich human resources and vast market. Macau has a vast potential market, and simple entry procedures have attracted tourists from all over the world. (2) Macau, as a platform for cultural exchanges between China and the West, continues to develop more broadly under the background of inheriting Chinese traditional culture and integrating Western culture. Macau's unique advantage has played an essential role in opening up the mainland and foreign markets, especially in cooperation with Portuguese-speaking countries. (3) Although Macau has a small land area, it has many natural and cultural resources. The historic city of Macau, which has a long history, has been listed as a United Nations cultural heritage. Tourists to Macau can feel the local customs and appreciate the long history and culture of Macau. On the one hand, these cultural resources have greatly enhanced tourists' yearning for Macau. On the other hand, the development of the tourism industry has also promoted the upgrading of other industries to better serve tourists.

Weaknesses Analysis

(1) Because Macau has a small land area, a large population, and not too many important enterprises, tourism has always been a pillar industry of Macau. This is undoubtedly a significant drawback for a city seeking comprehensive development. Adjusting the industrial structure and realizing all-round industrial development is the direction of Macau's continuous advancement of reform. (2) Macau is close to Hong Kong. Many tourists drop by Macau after visiting Hong Kong. Macau's convenient transportation also makes many tourists choose to go to Hong Kong or Zhuhai, Guangdong instead of staying in Macau after a day of sightseeing. According to statistics, the average time of tourists staying in Macau is 1.4 days, which is much lower than the time that tourists stay in the true sense. Therefore, Macau needs to speed up the construction of supporting facilities, add a wealth of tourism projects, and attract the attention of tourists as much as possible to extend the stay time of tourists. (3) The rapid development of tourism is inseparable from the support of human resources. As the training of talents cannot keep up with the development of the tourism industry, gaps in professional talents and job vacancies appear, which limits the development of Macau's tourism industry to some extent.

Opportunities Analysis

(1) The support of national policies and the influence of surrounding areas have brought new development opportunities to Macau's tourism industry. Macau is backed by mainland China and facing foreign markets; it is supported with a strong human market and resources. The advantages of “One Country, Two Systems,” the construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, the establishment of the Guangdong Free Trade Zone, the signing of the Guangdong-Macau Cooperation Framework Agreement , and the implementation of “The Belt and Road” initiative all contribute to the development of Macau's tourism industry and the overall economy, infusing the city with vitality and vitality. (2) Macau can exploit various types of tourism and develop the exhibition industry. Macau has the intersection of Chinese and Western cultures, which significantly promotes the “going out” and “bringing in” of the local economy. Enterprises in mainland China hope to strengthen cooperation with international enterprises via Macau, and international enterprises can enter the vast mainland market via Macau. The development of the convention and exhibition industry not only promotes the development of tourism but also increases the visibility of tourist destinations, attracts more tourists, and extends their stay time. Moreover, it has also promoted local economic development. The improvement of various large-scale infrastructures has attracted more investment and strengthened scientific and technological exchanges with different countries and regions (Liu and Li, 2019 ; Li, 2019 ).

Threats Analysis

(1) The narrow land area and inconvenient transportation restrict the further development of tourism. The imbalance between Macau's land area and population makes the tourism infrastructure incomplete. Famous scenic spots, such as Ruínas da Antiga Catedral de São Paulo, Largo do Senado, and Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro, will be overcrowded during the holidays, which will not only affect road traffic but also induce safety accidents. (2) The competition is fierce in the surrounding tourism market. As tourists continue to travel abroad, more countries and regions begin to focus on developing tourism. The rapid development of tourism in Southeast Asia has impacted Macau's tourism. Fierce market competition makes Macau tourism industry have to face a new round of reforms and upgrades (Su and Zhao, 2019 ).

The above analysis reveals the following demands: (1) the demand for tourism industry development. The current development of Macau's tourism industry has entered a tough period of transformation and upgrading. The imbalance between the supply and demand structure of the tourism market is very prominent. The development and operation modes of the industry are relatively traditional. (2) The demand for liberalized, diversified, and personalized tourism consumption. Looking up information and booking travel services anytime and anywhere are new demands for tourism consumption. This has put forward an unprecedented high standard of demand for the comprehensiveness, vividness, and detail of tourism public information services. (3) The demand for the transformation of service-oriented government functions and improvement of administrative efficiency. In the past, Macau's tourism industry was supervised and supported by government administration. They have acted as rule-makers and executors more often. With the deepening of marketization and the development of modern information technology, this type of management cannot solve tourism problems in Macau during the development of the industry.

Smart Travel Big Data Analysis Platform Based on Resources and Psychology

The present work is based on the resource-based smart travel service platform. On this basis, big data processing methods are added to analyze the impact of the smart service platform through different indexes. Hence, a big data travel service platform that is more suitable to the Macau region can be proposed through data optimization. The analysis and application of big data can ensure the sustainable development of tourism (Ardito et al., 2019 ). Figure 1 presents the structure of the designed platform.

The standard system of smart travel service platform.

Data used in the present work are collected through data mining, including data collection, data analysis, and result analysis. Figure 2 shows the data collection method of web crawlers. Data can also be obtained through third-party purchase (after filtering out the privacy information, data about the user's consumption status and ability are obtained). The tourism data can be captured in real-time through the above approaches. Government and enterprises need to fill in and report the data. Hence, the personnel need to enter the big data platform and input the information manually to ensure the data integrity. The collected data are analyzed and compared using algorithms according to the specific knowledge base and the corresponding database to draw and visualize the conclusions (Del Vecchio et al., 2018 ). Data mining is applied at the most basic layer of the model. Different classifications and algorithms are practiced to achieve the best model efficiency and ensure the integrity of the information on the travel service platform.

Schematic diagram of web crawler data scraping steps.

Tourism experience refers to the visual aesthetic experiences and the spiritual experience that tourists feel during traveling, such as learning and cognition; tourists not only observe the external expressions of things but also think about the rational world (Sedera et al., 2017 ). As one of the representative studies, Luo et al. ( 2018 ) classified tourism experience in their research. They believed that the ultimate pleasure of tourists through compensation or realization was defined as travel pleasure. Pleasure was the core of the tourism experience, and the purpose of the tourism experience was to seek happiness or pleasure. Pleasure could be divided into tourism aesthetic pleasure; that is, the pleasure obtained through transcendental tourism experience was tourism secular pleasure, which was the pleasure obtained through regressive tourism experience (Luo et al., 2018 ). The so-called secular tourism pleasure is the usual pleasure form of entering life. It is based on the utilitarian understanding of the perceived object through other organs other than the audiovisual senses. It is the collective term for all the pleasures in addition to the aesthetic pleasure experienced by tourists during the traveling process. The prerequisite and intensity of secular pleasure are related to the accumulation of previous experience, which varies with time, place, person, and event. It is a kind of pleasure that is obtained by a single low-level sense organ (such as touch, taste, and smell) other than audiovisual. The aesthetic tourism pleasure is the primary goal of tourism experience. It is a kind of psychological experience that gets rid of the sense of interest and utilitarianism. It refers to a psychological experience generated by tourists when they appreciate the beautiful nature, artwork, and other artificial products. In essence, experience is “a comprehensive aesthetic practice that integrates natural beauty, artistic beauty, and the beauty of social life.” Figure 3 shows the “4E” tourism experience model proposed by Pine and Gilmore (Santos et al., 2019 ). According to Pine and Gilmore, the essence of tourism is to obtain a pleasant experience. They divide the pleasure of tourism into aesthetic pleasure and secular pleasure.

“4E” model based on tourism experience.

Indicator Analysis and Model Construction

Literature about tourism psychology is reviewed and reorganized to build the three-level index system. As shown in Table 1 , the system includes the secular experience, the aesthetic experience, and the stimulating experience (Li, 2019 ; Li et al., 2020 ). The secular experience is reflected in dining, living, and sightseeing, including food safety, food delicacy, accommodation safety, accommodation comfort, and traveling convenience. The aesthetic experience is reflected in the sightseeing activities, including the convenience of sightseeing, the condition of nature/culture, and the comfort and safety of sightseeing trips. The stimulating experience is reflected in the freshness and stimulus brought by shopping and entertaining.

Construction of smart tourism index system based on tourist psychology.

According to the investigations of literature, models, and data, problems in the smart tourism construction in Macau are analyzed. On this basis, a smart tourism platform based on tourism psychology is built, as shown in Figure 4 . This platform specifically includes: (1) the basic service layer: this layer adopts the big data processing method. It includes the functions of data analysis and data collection, such as the corresponding calculation rule, storage pool, and network pool. (2) The psychological analysis of tourists: the tourism experience is divided into secular experience, aesthetic experience, and stimulating experience according to the consumption data and consumption-ability of tourists. These three experiences are analyzed from the six perspectives: dining, living, traveling, sightseeing, shopping, and entertaining to draw the psychological prediction of tourists. (3) The software service layer: as per the predicted psychological data of tourists, the software service layer is oriented to the special application subsystem, which implements business applications such as real-time passenger flow analysis and prediction, tourist value prediction, passenger flow monitoring analysis, and satisfaction index analysis. At the same time, the software can be expanded and updated. The system not only runs independently but also exchanges and shares data, which continuously expands the functions of the smart tourism service platform.

The smart tourism platform based on tourist psychology.

Model Performance Evaluation and Data Sources

Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a qualitative and quantitative analysis tool that classifies factors affecting the decision-making according to the target layer, the criterion layer, and the plan layer. Through AHP, the optimal solution can be obtained (Ho and Ma, 2018 ). Figure 5 illustrates the AHP structure of Macau's tourism industry. Here, factors affecting the services of Macau's tourism industry are determined by the scaling method. Besides, the opinions of experts are combined to score the indexes objectively. Suppose that W n represents the variable of the matrix, and aij refers to a collection of various variables. In that case, the judgment matrix between them is:

The AHP structure of Macau's tourism industry.

In the meantime, (1) (2) a i j = 1aji, ( I , j = 1, 2, 3, ⋯ n ) (3). Therefore, the following equation is obtained:

The experimental environment is summarized in Table 2 below. The operating system is Microsoft Windows 10. The platform is written in Python. The Oracle10g database is used as the basis for building the network framework.

Experimental development environment.

Questionnaires are distributed to survey whether this platform is helpful to the tourism experience. The questionnaire is designed according to the indexes in the performance evaluation. For each question, there are five options: “Excellent,” “Good,” “Fair,” “Poor,” and “Very Poor,” corresponding to 1, 0.8, 0.6, 0.4, and 0.2 points, respectively. A total of 300 questionnaires were issued, and 285 were returned, of which 270 were valid. The response rate is 95%, and the valid rate is 94.7%. The statistical software is utilized to analyze the reliability and validity of all questionnaires for subsequent in-depth research and analysis.

There are three data sources: (1) data provided on the Macau official tourism website are collected. The Macau tourism department is interviewed through telephone to obtain first-hand field survey data. Through analysis, summary, and induction, the problems in the development of Macau's tourism industry are summarized. (2) Comparative analysis: smart travel platforms in different provinces are compared to find feasible methods for the Macau tourism industry. In practical applications, the shortcomings and deficiencies of traditional tourism in management, marketing, and services are listed and compared with big data processing results to show the role of big data in the practical application of tourism. (3) Interview: heads of the Macau Tourism Bureau and Macau Regional Tourism Bureau are interviewed to understand the problems of Macau smart travel. Moreover, heads of related technology enterprises such as Beijing Golden Bridge Network Communication Co., Ltd. are interviewed.

The questionnaire survey is conducted to verify and improve the research design of smart travel ways and improve the tourism experience. The purpose is to verify whether the smart travel methods currently applied are helpful to the improvement of the tourism experience. The Forbidden City is added to the questionnaire as a case site. Through specific cases, it is hoped to understand the impact of smart travel on the quality of tourism experience in the current application. According to Sthapit's tourism experience model (Sthapit et al., 2019 ), the influencing factors in the interference variables include delay, comfort, convenience, accessibility to the destination, the nature of the destination, the quality of accommodation, the number of attractions and activities, and the ethnic nature of the destination. The influencing factors in the interaction process include the gap between actual feelings and expectations, the nature of the interaction with the destination residents and fellow tourists, the ability to distinguish the authenticity and illusion of events, the ability of psychological adjustment, and the ability to communicate. According to the nature of the case, the four factors of comfort, convenience, the gap between actual feelings and expectations, psychological adjustment, as well as the satisfaction of tourists' overall tourism experience, are selected. The questionnaire is designed according to the indexes in the performance evaluation; each question has 5 options: “Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, and Very Poor,” corresponding to 1, 0.8, 0.6, 0.4, and 0.2 points, respectively. Based on the indicator weights of the smart tourism platform of tourism psychology are shown in Table 3 above. A total of 300 questionnaires were sent out, and 285 were returned. Among them, 270 were valid questionnaires, with a response rate of 95% and a valid rate of 94.7%. Statistical software is employed to analyze the credibility and validity of all questionnaires.

Index weight of the smart tourism platform based on tourism psychology.

In the table, λmax = 3.030; CI = 0.001; RI = 0.58; CR = 0.001; CR < 0.1; the consistency has been verified .

Effectiveness of the Smart Tourism Platform

The visual data of the smart travel platform based on tourism psychology are illustrated in Figure 6 . In particular, the geographical distribution of tourists in Macau can be collected more accurately through this platform. Through the crawling rules, the system accurately counts the total number of tourists entering Macau. Changes in the number of tourists during 1 week are as follows: the number of tourists begins to increase on Oct. 1st; on Oct. 2nd, it continues to increase; on Oct. 3rd, it starts to decrease; on Oct. 5th, it reaches the peak. The actual number of tourists also show the same trend. Besides, the daily change index is analyzed. The curve can reveal the trend of tourists entering Macau during the National Day Holidays. These results show that the smart tourism platform based on tourism psychology has strong data mining and analysis capabilities, and the visual display effect is noticeable.

Results of statistical analysis of Macau's tourism data during the National Day Holidays in 2019.

Index Weight of the Smart Tourism Platform

Table 1 shows the result of the index weight analysis of the smart tourism platform based on tourism psychology. A detailed analysis of the questionnaire survey data reveal that tourists have a maximum weight of 0.523 for the aesthetic tourism experience, followed by the secular tourism experience, with a weight of 0.356. This shows that the majority of tourists in Macau undergo aesthetic sightseeing.

Figure 7 summarizes the results of block analysis on the weights of the platform indexes under different index systems. As shown in Figure 7A , in the secular tourism experience, the largest weight is the taste of food, reaching 0.396. The reason is that most tourists pay great attention to the cuisine of a region, and the taste of food can represent the culture and custom of a region. The weight of accommodation safety ranks second position, reaching 0.198. The aesthetic tourism experience is shown in Figure 7B , where the largest weight is the safety of the scenic area, reaching 0.312. The reason is that the safety of the accommodation determines the degree of pleasure of traveling; traveling is a matter of spending money to enjoy happiness, and such enjoyment will be greatly reduced if tourists spend more money due to personal safety. The stimulating tourism experience is shown in Figure 7C , where the weight of freshness sense ranks first, reaching 0.665. The above results suggest that the safety psychology of dining and living in secular tourism experience affects tourism consumption. In terms of sightseeing, more attention is paid to safety, and the sense of freshness id more important to tourists.

Weighted results of various indexes of the smart tourism platform based on tourist psychology [ (A) is the technical level index weighting result; (B) is the external environment index weighting result; (C) is the basic condition index weighting result].

All index weights are analyzed comprehensively, and the results are demonstrated in Table 4 . The weights of the criterion layer are 0.378, 0.462, and 0.16, respectively. Impacts coming from indexes of the smart tourism platform in descending order are as follows: secular tourism experience > authentic tourism experience > stimulating tourism experience. The above judgment matrix, single hierarchical ranking, and hierarchical total ranking analysis all pass the consistency test; thus, the calculated weights are acceptable. The results obtained from the above data analysis and block weight comparison are consistent.

Building an index system for the Macau smart travel service platform based on big data.

Overall Performance of the Smart Tourism Platform

Figure 8 illustrates the scoring results of the designed platform rated by the heads and staff from various industries. This platform receives a comprehensive score of 68.45, which is excellent. Overall, the secular tourism experience accounts for a large proportion because most tourists seek for leisure and entertainment, and therefore their consumptions are normal and average. They prefer destinations and travel plans that can improve mood and pleasure. From a partial perspective, the most important factor that affects the platform is that people consider the total score of tourism safety to be 75.14, followed by the authenticity of the scenic spot, with a comprehensive score of 73.12. This is the most important issue to construct the smart tourism service platform in Macau. The comfort requirement of tourists for accommodation is not very high, which is only 60.85. Therefore, the local tourism department of Macau should reduce its investment in accommodation and increase its investment in the safety and comfort of tourist attractions.

Scoring results of the smart tourism platform based on tourism psychology.

Discussion and Conclusion

To construct the Macau Smart Travel Service Platform, emphasis should be placed on designing and development according to tourists' travel psychology. This requires a large amount of tourism data. However, in the actual research process, many scenic spots and enterprises cannot realize the importance of data compared to actual benefits, which cannot guarantee the sustainable development of Macau's tourism industry. Therefore, on the basis of the data results, the following suggestions are put forward: (1) the data concepts shall be changed, and the data awareness shall be cultivated, including data openness and sharing concepts, data analysis concepts, and data application concepts. Data involved in tourism works should be emphasized and respected to be used for publicity and services. (2) The major tourism service platforms shall be centralized to collect tourist consumption data. Then, these data shall be analyzed using big data and in-depth mining technologies to find new growth points of the tourism industry from these data. (3) The interaction with tourists shall be strengthened, the communication with tourists shall be deepened through social media such as WeChat and TikTok, and tourists' travel needs shall be understood in time. In this way, a sustainable smart travel service platform can be established, and market-oriented approaches can be applied to mobilize tourism enterprises to raise funds in various aspects and cooperate in constructing part of the smart travel platform.

The government smart travel public service system refers to the general term for public products and services provided by the government or other social organizations that are not profit-oriented, have obvious publicity, and meet the common needs of tourists as the core. It connects tourism suppliers, tourism regulatory agencies, and other tourism market-themed activities in various tourism information demanding links, such as tourism transportation, tourism safety public services, and tourism environmental public services. The public service system of smart travel takes the improvement of tourist satisfaction as the core and the tourism information service as the main body. Its purpose is to meet the needs of individual tourists for the richness, comparability, timeliness, and convenience of obtaining travel information during the dining, living, traveling, sightseeing, shopping, and entertaining process of the travel. For services that can be achieved through market operations, the government should issue relevant policies and implement supportive supervision; moreover, the government should promote the tasks that enterprises are unwilling to do but are related to the overall situation. For example, online services are mainly travel information services provided by local enterprises, aiming to meet the diverse needs of tourists. The government regulates public information services extended by leveraging the nationwide database resources of travel enterprises such as Ctrip.com and eLong.com. The government should lead components of offline smart travel public service infrastructure. The tourism management department also obtains tourist information and real-time market operation data by providing smart travel public services to enhance the timeliness and pertinence of management. In short, by building a smart travel public service system, methods to promote the tourism industry can be changed thoroughly. The level of tourism services can be improved to make tourists travel conveniently. The image of tourism cities can be enhanced, and the supervision of the tourism market can be strengthened to provide tourists with fast, accurate, and comprehensive information services.

From the perspective of tourism experience, smart travel, a new vane in the tourism field, is analyzed. The experience needs of tourists are understood by studying the ways of experience generation. Through the six major elements of tourism: dining, living, traveling, sightseeing, shopping, and entertaining, a research design for smart promotion of tourism experience is constructed, whose usability in practice is then validated, proving that some of the current smart travel measures can improve tourists' tourism experience. This is theoretically innovative. Besides verifying the active role of existing smart travel methods in improving the tourism experience, practical smart travel measures that can improve the tourism experience are proposed, considering the smart travel participants in real-world applications, such as hotels and scenic spots. The smart travel model based on tourist psychology has strong data mining and analysis capabilities, and the visual display effect is obvious. From a psychological perspective, tourists prefer travel destinations with excellent urban security and scenic authenticity. The comprehensive scores for the two are 75.14 points and 73.12 points, respectively. Therefore, Macau's local tourism department should reduce the investment in accommodation and increase the investment in the safety and comfort of tourist attractions.

Despite the constructed big data smart travel platform based on psychology, some weaknesses are found in the present work. First, due to time and research funding issues, only three regions in Macau are surveyed, only covering a small amount of data. Moreover, the questionnaires are mostly distributed on-site. In the future, they can be issued online. Second, because the data of the major tourism service platforms are commercial secrets, only the available network data are analyzed, with a small data amount. Finally, there are few categories of psychology research on tourists, only considering the sense of experience brought by tourism rather than specific consumption data. In the following works, these aspects will be analyzed and research in-depth to realize the practical application of the platform as soon as possible.

Data Availability Statement

Ethics statement.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by City University of Macau Ethics Committee. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study. Written informed consent was obtained from the individual(s) for the publication of any potentially identifiable images or data included in this article.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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