The tourism industry has great potential for growth, and has a tremendous economic effect such as vast employment creation and regional economic activation linked with other industries. Recently, there has been a growing need for smart tourism based o ...
The tourism industry has great potential for growth, and has a tremendous economic effect such as vast employment creation and regional economic activation linked with other industries. Recently, there has been a growing need for smart tourism based on infrastructures and knowledge-based infrastructure that have been developed due to the development of information technology. Smart tourism is defined as “an holistic approach that provide tour information, service related to travel, such as destination, food, transportation, reservation, travel guide, conveniently to tourists through IT devices” (Koo et al., 2013, p. 2). In this vein, smart tourism ecosystem consequently can be defined as a tourism system that takes advantage of smart technology in creating, managing and delivering intelligent touristic services/experiences and is characterized by intensive information sharing and value co-creation” (Gretzel et al., 2015, p. 560).
Under the agenda of “Creating Economy and Job Creation”, we built a smart tourism research center to carry out an interdisciplinary study called “Building Competitiveness Advantage through Creating Smart Tourism Ecosystems”, and intended to strengthen Korea’s tourism competitiveness through the theoretical and practical implementation of smart tourism.
To do this, we had set up a research plan to conduct research about smart tourism content, information technology and tourist in the short term, to evaluate and validate smart tourism competitiveness in the medium-term, and to proliferate and globalize smart tourism in the long term. As a result, we archived up to 467% superior to the research plan with 13 international professional journals (11 in SSCI, 2 in SCOPUS), 32 in Korean domestic professional journals, 72 in conferences (29 in international conferences, 43 in Korean conferences). In particular, by achieving an average score of 220% in SSCI-grade international journals for three years compared to the research plan, we not only have faithfully carried out our original research plans, but also achieved quantitative and qualitative achievements beyond our research plans.
Specifically, in the first year, we conducted research on smart tourists and smart tourism information systems, and tried to establish the concept of smart tourism ecosystem in the Korea-China Smart Tourism Association and International conferences (ENTER 2014) in line with the first year’s research objectives. In order to achieve the research goal of the second year, we conducted basic research to evaluate smart tourism competitiveness, academic presentation on smart tourism competitiveness model, and formed a business model to participate in the tourism R&D project conducted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. Also, we have opened course in global track of graduate school to achieve the high publicity effect. In order to achieve smart tourism expansion and globalization in the third year, we have signed an MOU with Nankai University in China and participated in the joint seminar with Tokyo Institute of Tech, which led to “Korea-Japan Smart Tourism Research Network Project” by the Korea Research Foundation. Also, we have established the “Smart Tourism Research Center” and sponsored the first Smart Tourism Congress hosted by the city of Barcelona, Spain.