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This research investigates the state of the art among Switzerland (CH)’s and Liechtenstein (FL)’s destinations, intended here as Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs), when it comes to their relationship with data: what data are collected, how they are stored, analyzed and what impact they have on the destination. This study aims at bringing insights into smart tourism studies as a key aspect of the debate is how DMOs deal with data. Based on a survey performed with CH’s and FL’s DMOs and related stakeholders, results suggested that there are common conceptual nodes shared by practitioners when it comes to defining smart destinations. However, when it comes to data-related practices (data collection, storage, analysis and sharing) DMOs have very different processes in place. There are organizations that collect but do not extensively analyze data, while others are still not so keen on sharing their data with the whole destination ecosystem. Furthermore, organizations’ decision-making processes appear to be based to some extent on data, especially when it comes to (digital) marketing initiatives and campaigns, although behaviors are quite different also in this area. Destination managers might benefit from this paper as the study shows how to investigate data-related practices of an organization. This type of analysis could allow an assessment of the situation and an understanding of the direction in which the organization might move forward.

Nowadays, advanced tools allow the personalization of email communication with tourism clients or prospects based on explicit (e.g. name, age, language, country) and implicit indicators (e.g. ranking of activity in the opening rate of the newsletter, browsing preferences, online preferences provided by cookies, etc.). However, knowing how audiences react to emails allows Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) to create content clusters for personalized communication. The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the preferences on tourism email marketing of different audiences based on a specific explicit indicator, namely the language chosen by users to receive communications by a DMO. A content analysis on a longitudinal dataset based on 131 newsletter messages sent between 2018 and 2021 to more than 50′000 contacts by a DMO in Switzerland was performed. Results show that content should be adapted to different audiences speaking different languages instead of providing just a translation. Specifically, the German-speaking audience seems to be more inclined to messages that focus on winter sports and hiking, the Italian-speaking audience to news about hiking and information on COVID-19, the French-speaking audience to news about promotions, while the English-speaking audience to contents on discounts and COVID-19-related. These results provide an important contribution to studies on tourism personalization of communication in the context of email marketing, suggesting the role of content adaptation according to the language and cultural background of the audience. DMO managers can also benefit from this research in understanding how to address a similar study on their datasets and compare the emerged content clusters.