This paper reviews the literature on tourism destination competitiveness from different aspects, focusing on comparative and competitive advantages. Also, the paper highlights the importance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in tourism destinations and their increasing impact on the achievement of destination competitiveness. Thanks to the wider application of ICTs in tourism, tourists nowadays are well informed and have access to global market which creates a new dynamic environment by creating a smart demand. Since smartness emphasizes on ICT-based tools, including smartness integration for value co-creation, it can increase and enhance destination competitiveness. In this regard, special emphasis is placed on exploring the core components of smartness and smart tourism destination.

This study explores the underlying dimensions of destination competitiveness, analyzing the contributions of government and industry stakeholders in enhancing the competitive position of Serbia on the international tourism market. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were used to explore latent dimensionality of “destination competitiveness” among 48 competitiveness attributes evaluated by experts from the public and private sectors of Serbia’s tourism industry. Results show that Serbian competitiveness structure comprises five dimensions: risk management and adaptive environmental strategies, innovation and product development, planning for sustainable development, networking and community concern, and education for sustainability. The research identifies challenges and suggests areas where private and public linkages should be strengthened in order to enhance the competitiveness of Serbia’s tourism industry. Generically, the study advances our understanding of destination competitiveness, its multidimensional nature, and the implications for policy making.

The aim of this study is to explore a tourist preference towards information-communication technologies (ICTs) use at large-scale events, as well as disadvantages of insufficient ICTs implementation. In addition, we highlighted the importance of ICT usage on large-scale events for achieving smart tourism agenda. The importance and performance analysis of 38 attributes related to usage of ICTs at EXIT, a well-known European music festival held annually in Novi Sad (Serbia), was conducted. By employing an exploratory factor analysis, seven factors were extracted. The results show that the “level of smartness” of EXIT festival is relatively low. Furthermore, some advanced smart applications do not necessarily match tourists’ needs and interests, while festival organizers should focus on more basic online information access. Festival should make an optimal use of smart tourism facilities by offering the right smart tourism devices and services, enabling tourists to meet smart technologies on time.

Business travel, as the sector with the fastest growth in the tourism industry globally, has received increased attention from both countries and cities, particularly from emerging destinations. In developing economies, business travel, including attending meetings, conferences, incentives and other business events, often plays a leading role in the growth of the wider travel and tourism sector. Therefore, tourism authorities and convention bureaus at the national and city levels have been struggling to attract international conferences and a larger number of participants to conferences. Understanding factors, which appear to be important in the conference participation decision-making process, can help conference organizers and destinations to attract more participants and thus gain more benefit from this growing sector of the tourism industry. Therefore, this study aims to examine factors affecting the conference participation decision-making from the academics' perspective. Furthermore, it investigates how different socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents influence the extracted factors of the conference participation decision-making process. The data was collected from the academics employed at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia. The findings reveal six dimensions of conference participation decision-making: destination stimuli, costs and destination accessibility, educational and professional opportunities, intervening opportunities, location factors, and conference factors. The results also show that there are statistically significant differences in some extracted factors between respondents of different gender, age, education level, and academic position, while the frequency of participation in international conferences does not influence the factors. The results could be of interest to all stakeholders in the business travel and tourism industry.

Tour guide performance has been a hotly debated academic topic, owing to the critical role they play in facilitating a variety of tourist experiences. Similarly, museum tour guides are the initial point of contact for tourists and have a substantial impact on the total visitor experience, but their performance is far less investigated. Visitors’ satisfaction and behavior intentions are inextricably linked to museum guide performances in this case. The purpose of this research was to implement and test a well-established scale for assessing tour guide performance in the museum context. Moreover, the aim was also to single out and discuss museum guide types based on their performances. The research was conducted during May and June 2021 on a sample of 255 visitors from five museums in Serbia. The data were processed by SPSS, R and RStudio. The results indicate the existence of five museum guide types: Classic Professional, Agile Empath, Operational Erudite, Trustworthy Caretaker, and Passionate Socializer. The study explores sociodemographic differences in visitors’ evaluations of tour guide performances and gives theoretical and managerial implication for each museum guide type.