Abstract:

The paper aims to contribute at the emerging debate on smart tourism by presenting a methodological framework to support destinations in creating their own identity. The methodology is the result of a literature review aimed to deepen the meaning of tourism as regional integrated system of actors and knowledge-intensive industry largely interested by the diffusion of digital and social technologies that enable processes of users’ co-creation as well as of the preliminary evidences of two case studies built around two ongoing experimentations of digital tourism, #Appiedi and #SalentoUpNDown. Carried out in Apulia, both the two initiatives are aimed to promote and testing a model of smart tourism, labelled with the #ApuliaSmarTourism, inspired to the principles of service co-creation, digitalization and user centrality.