Information and Management

Special Issue on Smart Tourism: Traveler, Business, and Organizational Perspectives

Guest Editors
Chulmo Koo, College of Hotel and Tourism Management, Kyung Hee University (South Korea)
Jaehyun Park, Industrial Engineering and Management, Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan)
Jae-Nam Lee, Korea University Business School (South Korea)

Challenges and Opportunities in Smart Tourism

Smart tourism highlights digital convergence in content, device, and service Tourism (Gretzel, Sigala et al., 2015; Werthner et al., 2015). The convergence of tourism and Information Technology (IT) has provided a variety of new features and functions of IT-enabled products, systems, and services in tourism and hospitality business. These IT-innovations have led to the exceptional growth of multiple tourism and hospitality organizations (e.g. Airbnb, Yelp, Uber, Couchsurfing and Google Maps). As a result, these tourism-related information service and platforms have increased the number of tourists and enabled individual travelers to easily and efficiently manage their travelling schedule, especially as regards their traveling patterns (e.g., preference, time, space, and budget). However, the radically changing IT-enabled tourism and hospitality business have encountered a variety of challenges. The main challenge is grasping the context of tourists’ behaviors, emotions, and latent factors to create new business and service applications. Technology-enhanced tourism may generate valuable products and services to ensure unexpected economic growth and to contribute to the digital society. Therefore, smart tourism significantly contributes to this phenomenon.

Furthermore, technology may challenge a human-centered approach for transforming travel behaviors and the tourism business. To address this particular challenge, smart tourism needs to adopt a user-centered design (Abras et al., 2004; Norman and Draper, 1986) beyond the technology and system perspectives. Participatory design (Kensing and Blomberg, 1998; Muller and Kuhn, 1993) and the design thinking approach (Brown, 2008; Buchanan, 1992) serve as methodological directions for identifying the complex tourists’ contexts and their latent information environments. Using these design approaches, we will elucidate not only technology-enhanced tourism but also contextual inquiries to deal with latent tourists’ behavioral patterns, communication protocols, media preference, and decision-making process in travel. Based on the findings of the special issue, tourism and hospitality business and organization can synthesize new business models and applications to migrate toward smart tourism.

Topics in Smart Tourism
The special issue’s particular interest is on papers that focus on (1) traveler-centered design: designing tourists’ behaviors (2) smart tourism business networks, and (3) service design: design contents, products, devices, and process innovations. Understanding the changes and trends in tourism through IT involvement and their effect on travel business can provide valuable theoretical and practical implications to tourism industry. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Concepts and theories of smart tourism
• Case studies of smart tourism
• Technologies for design tourism
• Electronic brokerage and marketplaces
• Swarms, social network services and collective decision making
• IT architectures and models for design tourism
• Design business models and the role of IT
• Barriers and ingredients for the developments of design smart systems
• Acceptance, adoption, and diffusion of design tourism systems
• Ensure privacy and security in designing tourism infrastructures
• Effect of design technologies on traditional tourism
• Policy, strategy, and management of design tourism
• Design tourism business process
• Network analysis of a networked tourism industry
• Business intelligence for design tourism technologies and services
• Research methods for the analysis of design tourism-related phenomena

Important Dates
• Submission Period Due: From February 1, 2016 to February 28, 2016

Paper Submission
We welcome papers from a wide range of disciplines as well as papers based on either quantitative or qualitative approaches. Implications of findings for theory and practice are essential and we encourage papers that extend existing theories.
All the submitted papers will go through a rigorous review process as that for the regular paper submissions. Papers that pass the initial screening will undergo no more than two rounds of revision. Papers not accepted by the end of the second round of revision will be rejected. Given the tight schedule, there will not be enough time for major revision. Therefore when preparing your submission, it is strongly required to try your best to make your paper publishable as it is.
Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished papers. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and judged on correctness, originality, significance, quality of presentation, and relevance to the special issue topics of interest. Submitted papers may not have appeared in or be under consideration for another journal. Authors are instructed to follow the Guide for Authors and submission guidelines for the journal at the journal’s website, http://www.elsevier.com/…/infor…/0378-7206/guide-for-authors, and to choose "Special Issue: Smart Tourism" as the paper type in the online submission system.
Further enquiries about the special issue can be directed to Chulmo Koo (helmetgu@khu.ac.kr), Jaehyun Park (park.j.ai@m.titech.ac.jp) or Jae-Nam Lee (isjnlee@korea.ac.kr)