Technology Application in the Asian Tourism Industry: Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain in Smart City Involvement

Abstract

Tourism is playing a vital role by contributing toward city’s economies, business opportunities, and employment particularly in restaurant and retail sectors. In order to meet the expectations of today’s travelers, smart city projects have been placed to enhance the travelers’ experiences. The core concepts of smart city’s infrastructure bring benefits for the tourism industry. Smart cities have been regarded as better places to live with enhanced networking, improved transportation, predictive crime prevention, crowd analytics, and green technology. Many researchers argue that by employing Information and Communication Technologies, smart cities are improving the citizens’ life quality, local economy, traffic management, transport, and environment which can enhance the travelers’ experiences in any country. Because of the relevance of smart cities to several stakeholders and advantages and challenges related to its implementation, the smart cities’ concept has attracted the significant attention of scholars from multiple fields. This chapter is intended to describe the features of smart city and its advantages for tourists. This chapter provides implications for tourism industry of Asian countries through the involvement of smart city. It also discusses how new technologies such as Internet of Things, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain enhance the overall urban planning and contribute to building smarter smart cities. Improvement of services in tourism industry such as logistics, ticketing, and lodging requires real-time analysis of data from Internet of Everything. We also present and discuss the co-relationship between smart cities and sustainable tourism and the challenges faced such as crowd management, congestion, quality of services, and environment, infrastructure, and cities resilience to human and natural disasters.