Towards Smart Tourism Destination: An Empirical Study on Sharm El Sheikh City, Egypt

Abstract

The quick advancement of modern technology imposes computerization and digitizing to allsocieties. The smart tourism destinations concept comes from the advances in smart cities.Recently, destinations began to reshape their duties and their entrepreneurial logics, involvingtourists as active providers and initiators of their own experiences and considering newtechnologies as the essential instruments for deciding tourism outcomes. It means the advent of anovel pattern of destinations, the smart tourism destinations, in which new technologies are socomprehensively utilized to have a crucial impact on tourism experiences, improves destinations’abilities to compete and favor tourism development projects, starting from these issues.The aim of the research is to investigate the development of Sharm El-Sheikh as a smart tourismdestination and add to the ongoing debate on innovation in tourism, by presenting an interpretativeframework indicating the way in which technological instruments in a smart tourism destination mayenhance the co-creation of tourism experiences. This research used the descriptive analyticalapproach, where a questionnaire was prepared and distributed to a random sample of seventy five(75) experts in information and communication technologies and academic experts in the tourismsector. 60 (80%) of sample was retrieved.The research reached several results, the highest mean values for barriers to become smart tourismdestinations emerged for the item “deficiency of staff” (mean = 4.60, standard deviation =0.848).Thehighest mean value for opportunities to become a smart tourism destination is the item “Possibility ofa network of municipalities as a platform for collaboration” (mean=4.60, standard deviation = 0.588).The research recommended that smart tourism destinations should be use of networks andtechnologies more effectively and efficiently. Training programs should also be considered to betterutilize tools and techniques needed, to establish such kind of destinations.