Smart Tourism: A practice approach

In this chapter, we explore how a Smart Destination is imagined and grappled with at an organizational level in its first and tentative stages of development. Drawing on practice theory and research in the North Denmark Region, we show how the idea of Smart Tourism is embraced by almost all of the stakeholders in the area, while the full potentials of this new phenomenon are experienced as difficult to realize. Abstaining from seeing Smart Tourism as a unilinear technological or digital evolution, we present four situated configurations of Smart Tourism. We argue that Smart Tourism is not made up solely by technology and data, but must be understood as a socio-technical and collaborative accomplishment. This entails seeing seemingly mundane issues as central to developing Smart Tourism and to link the development of Smart Tourism to transformations in the practices of everyday organizational life.