CAN “SMARTNESS” OF A DESTINATION BE MEASURED? BUILDING AND TESTING A GENERALIZED FRAMEWORK FOR MEASURING SMART TOURISM DESTINATION DEVELOPMENT ON THE EXAMPLE OF CROATIA
CAN “SMARTNESS” OF A DESTINATION BE MEASURED? BUILDING AND TESTING A GENERALIZED FRAMEWORK FOR MEASURING SMART TOURISM DESTINATION DEVELOPMENT ON THE EXAMPLE OF CROATIA

Summary/Abstract: Smart tourism is rapidly proving to be more than just a fancy buzzword in the tourism industry. It is a concept that highlights the already indispensable role of advanced technologies in tourism, but also emphasizes the importance of data and smart destination management. A review of the related literature shows that several authors have already tried to analyze the components of a smart tourism destination and build a general framework for measuring the state of development of such a destination. Therefore, this research aims at reexamining and testing the existing frameworks for analyzing the development of smart tourism destinations. The suggested framework should be flexible enough to allow analysis of the state of smart tourism development in destinations regardless of their size or tourism congestion, but it should also serve as a beacon for defining a possible direction of the development of a smart tourism destination. An extensive literature review was made and some of the related research findings were synthesized in order to describe a general framework for the analysis of the development of a smart tourism destination. The framework was subsequently tested on the example of Croatia, which can be considered a successful tourist destination. The suggested framework is just a theoretical construct which provides general guidelines on how to approach the implementation of a concrete apparatus and exact metrics for measuring smart tourism development. In practical terms, this research represents a small step towards building an operational framework that could be used in real life scenarios.

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