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Introduction
Smart tourism as a means to competitively position destinations (Boes et al., 2016; Koo et al., 2016) has received extensive academic and industry attention (Johnson and Samakovlis, 2019). It is especially relevant for city destinations, which often offer very similar tourism experiences and, at the same time, increasingly struggle with the negative consequences of having to accommodate growing tourist flows in confined urban spaces (Postma and Schmuecker, 2017). It also builds on overall smart city developments in critical ways, taking advantage of mobility, innovation, sustainability, data availability and technology infrastructure investments to support enhanced tourism experiences (Gretzel et al., 2018). On the flip side, smart tourism can serve as a testbed for smart city initiatives, allowing for the roll-out of technological or social innovations on a smaller scale (e.g. in tourist precincts or selected hotels). As a consequence, most smart tourism development efforts have focused on urban destinations and are intricately linked to achieving smart city development goals (Gretzel, 2018).
Smart tourism development is resource intensive and requires the mobilization of a diverse array of stakeholders (Presenza et al., 2014). In contrast to destination marketing, which mostly aims at promoting the tourism experiences supplied by individual tourism providers and often only represents member organizations, smart destinations require more hands-on governance and management of the actual destination offerings. For a smart tourism ecosystem (Gretzel, Werthner, Koo and Lamsfus, 2015) to survive and strive, the right living conditions need to be present. Shafiee et al. (2019) refer to this process as establishing the intervening and context conditions that enable concrete smart tourism development actions. Most smart destinations are at the beginning stages of creating the foundations for smart tourism development, even in cities like Seoul, where smart tourism has received attention and support for many years (Gretzel et al., 2018).
It is not surprising that, like the smart city literature (Yigitcanlar et al., 2018), the smart tourism literature has mostly focused on aspects of technology and governance (Johnson and Samakovlis, 2019). However, convincing a myriad of stakeholders far beyond the typical tourism realm and the typical sphere of influence of a destination marketing organization (DMO) requires strategic communication aimed at educating, explaining and motivating the new and rather complex notion...