Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed numerous, lasting adverse effects on the global tourism industry. At the same time, it exposed the competitive advantages that existing smart tourism infrastructure could provide for addressing urgent health issues and providing meaningful smart services. This paper initially provides examples of smart geospatial services based on COVID-19 pandemic-related data, such as algorithms for measuring social distancing through CCTV and proximity contract tracing protocols and applications. Indeed, smart destinations, as an evolutionary step of smart cities, very quickly became a practical and research framework in various other disciplines, from leisure and service-oriented to technical and geospatial domains. However, various technologies employed and interests of different stockholders create a constant need for rescaling of smart data to facilitate their usability in providing optimized smart tourism services. One of the pressing concerns is the functional alignment of geospatial data with tourism-related data. Thus, we aim to pinpoint the growing importance of smart geospatial services, by pointing to the main downturn of the current smart destination issue with geospatial data resolutions, and, by building upon the relations of the geospatial layer of data with the tourism-specific layer. To this end, we pinpoint two further research directions - reinvestigating spatial and temporal resolution as a core of data smartness and the need for contextual (tourism-oriented) scaling of smart technology. This could be of keen interest in post-pandemic tourism, where smart geospatial services will be of pressing concern, but also it still an issue to be resolved in further smart destination development.
Highlights
With a quick spread of COVID-19, the globalized world has suddenly faced an immediate threat of infection and high death rates
This “geospatial flaw” could potentially limit the capacities of smart destinations to tailor their services in post-pandemic tourism, where more emphasis will be put on locations, both for the issues of health safety or for its traditional importance for the optimization of smart services for tourists
Vast amounts of spatiotemporal referenced data collected through smart sensor infrastructure can be analyzed and transformed in real-time through cloud computing (Li et al, 2013), which will eventually support the managing of smart city and smart tourism destination
Summary
With a quick spread of COVID-19, the globalized world has suddenly faced an immediate threat of infection and high death rates. The sense of urgency in western societies, occurred a bit later, with media reports from northern Italy These reports showed another layer of a threat – the inability of one of the most advanced health systems in the world to cope with a problem of this scale when no vaccine or conventional treatment is available. Tourism can not occur just in virtual spaces, and many solutions have appeared to help in resolving the spatial issue of the current pandemic – a physical distancing. All services are heavily impacted by the geospatial perspective for mitigating the issue of physical distancing Many of those examples came from states and cities that have extensively developed and optimized their smart infrastructure, such as South Korea, Singapore, or interestingly, Helsinki, that, together with Lyon, was rewarded for the first edition of the European Capital of Smart Tourism competition in 2019. Government Technology Agency, Singapore Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport (MOLIT), South Korea
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