Indicators are a fundamental tool for destinations in their progress towards a more sustainable tourism development. However, the lack of real progress and the accelerated technological change are obliging policy makers to rethink the existing indicator systems. This paper examines the relationship between smart cities and destinations and sustainable tourism indicators by analyzing proposals at different scales. It provides a critical review of international smart city standards and the role that sustainability indicators play within them. Then, it conducts a content analysis of planning instruments applied in smart strategies in Spain, focusing on how sustainability indicators are considered under the smart paradigm. At the regional-local scale, this research compares two sets of indicators and tests the scientific validity of one of them for addressing the imbalance suffered by many indicators between their usefulness for policy makers and their academic rigor. The results show that little progress has been achieved despite the appropriation of the sustainability discourse by smart city and smart destination promoters. These findings reveal the (limited) real contribution made by smart cities/destinations to sustainable tourism development and contribute to identifying weaknesses and opportunities so as to redirect smart policies and projects. A final discussion contextualizes the findings within the novel framework of smart sustainability and highlights the need to reinforce public governance of urban and tourist spaces.

La irrupción de Internet y el progresivo despliegue de las tecnologías de la información y comunicación (TIC), ha generado interesantes oportunidades para la planificación y gestión de las ciudades y destinos turísticos del siglo XXI. En este escenario, los entornos urbanos producen una gran cantidad de datos como consecuencia directa del uso intensivo de las TIC. Este trabajo se aproxima al concepto de Open Data desde dos hipótesis. Por una parte, que su aplicación en el ámbito del turismo puede generar un ecosistema innovador que mejore la experiencia turística, gracias al diseño de productos y servicios TIC. Y por otra, que su grado actual de aplicación en turismo es bajo y necesita de medidas de apoyo. Con el fin de corroborarlas, se plantean dos objetivos. En primer lugar, y desde una vertiente teórico-conceptual, profundizar en la terminología de Open Data, conceptos relacionados y sus implicaciones para la gestión turística. En segundo lugar, conocer su grado de aplicación actual en el turismo, para proponer recomendaciones que favorezcan su uso. Con este fin, se analizan los conjuntos de datos abiertos en turismo de las ciudades de la Red Española de Ciudades Inteligentes (RECI). Este trabajo constituye un punto de partida en la investigación de las relaciones entre Open Data y turismo.

The current tourism landscape intertwines physical and digital realms, giving rise to smart tourism. This paradigm shift leverages technology, generating large amounts of data from sensors and mobile devices, offering vast opportunities for strategic tourism planning and management. Smart tourism destinations (STDs) are pivotal in this context, utilising technology to enhance visitor experiences and facilitate informed decision-making through proficient data management. Within this framework, open data emerges as a crucial aspect. This study aims to demonstrate how combining open data with a local business campaign data can innovate tourism management and foster smart ecosystems. This approach facilitates public-private collaboration and strengthens STD models at various administrative levels. A novel search engine was used to identify suitable open data for integration, employing word embeddings to perform semantic searches and enhance traditional data retrieval methods. The findings highlight the potential of open data in supporting the tourism industry. Integrating open and proprietary data not only enriches tourist experiences but also informs destination management strategies. The contributions of this work enable STDs to enhance the decision-making process by (i) demonstrating the feasibility of integrating retail data and open data for tourism management; (ii) describing an AI-based data search engine for discovering open data relevant to STDs; and (iii) presenting and discussing new findings on the use of retail data in conjunction with external open data in a real case study.

Accessibility of tourism destination of official websites has been widely considered under the umbrella of Smart Tourism Destinations. Unfortunately, digital accessibility perceived by users is still a challenge since there are a plethora of websites apart from DMOs (Destination Management Organizations). Users with disabilities encounter problems when accessing these websites, especially elderly people with visual problems while browsing and reading the contents of a website, thus making it more difficult to organize a travel. In this article, we propose a Web Augmentation Framework for Accessibility and apply it to a tourism scenario (WAFRA4Tourism) in order to improve the accessibility of other-than-DMO websites at runtime. To this aim, the framework uses Web augmentation techniques that extend the website with voice interaction and new actions useful for a person to be inspired as well as to start organizing a trip: select and read aloud fragments, increase font size, facilitate navigation and show videos. The evaluation of the framework shows its usefulness to ease website access for visually impaired users compared to using screen readers. In this way, perceived digital accessibility of a destination is ameliorated, not only considering DMO’s websites but external websites on the destination.