Exploring the relationship between digital services advance and smart tourism in cities: Empirical evidence from Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the years, digital advancement and tourists have become even more interrelated in the urban dynamics and cities’ trajectories. This connection influences cities’ strategies and the choices of internal (citizens) and external (tourists) users. This evolution includes the advance of new digital services that boost cities into a new, more efficient, dynamic, sustainable, and customized context in line with the current tourism needs and trends. Therefore, the implementation of digital services in cities represents a current and innovative process that implies an incremental evolution of the local environment, directly contributing to the ongoing transformation of cities. However, this evolution must focus on cities’ users and not only on local policies. Thus, using a GMM method and a 9-year panel dataset covering 30 cities in Italy, this paper shows that the relationship between digital services and tourism inflow is positively related up to a point in which it tends to be an inverted U-shaped curve. These results contribute to the current debate about the overdevelopment of technological advances in cities and smart tourism trends.