Cities and tourism entities invest massive resources into smart system initiatives as information technologies are a key factor for a city’s destination competitiveness. Moreover cities around the world are increasingly recognizing the smart tourism city concept and related strategies as means of optimizing sustainable environments. Particularly for cities facing emerging issues of residents’ negative perceptions towards tourism, smart tourism city empowers a city to rise to this challenge by creating urban spaces that residents and visitors can enjoy together. However, smart tourism city research initiatives still fail to address the full spectrum of related and potential developments. This study presents a conceptual approach to defining smart tourism city: the smart city and its components are defined and contrasted with smart tourism and its components. The resulting convergence—smart tourism city—is then examined in light of a number of pioneering examples of smart tourism cities and its vital roles in the age of sustainable development. The main purpose of this study is to show the interests of locals and tourists context and the roles of ‘smart’ government leadership to researchers and practitioners.

The popularity of hosting international conferences has increased, as their positive economic and social effects are now widely recognized. The Korean government selected the international conference industry as one of the new industry engines in propelling the economy. This study examines the factors of participation in international conferences from the value perspective. To this end, a value-based adoption model (VAM) is employed to test our research model using empirical data. A total of 192 questionnaires which were acquired from International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2017 in Seoul were coded for analysis. The research findings reveal that technical support, program usefulness, and perceived threats are predictors of perceived value with significant positive influence and, moreover, the perceived threats are affected by media exposure of North Korea missile threats. Perceived value is found to exert significant effects on revisit intention. The major contribution of the paper is to discuss both the practical and theoretical implications, providing information to destination marketers, and employing VAM in international conferences research.