Rescaling smart destinations: The growing importance of smart geospatial services during and after COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed numerous, lasting adverse effects on the global tourism industry. At the same time, it exposed the competitive advantages that existing smart tourism infrastructure could provide for addressing urgent health issues and providing meaningful smart services. This paper initially provides examples of smart geospatial services based on COVID-19 pandemic-related data, such as algorithms for measuring social distancing through CCTV and proximity contract tracing protocols and applications. Indeed, smart destinations, as an evolutionary step of smart cities, very quickly became a practical and research framework in various other disciplines, from leisure and service-oriented to technical and geospatial domains. However, various technologies employed and interests of different stockholders create a constant need for rescaling of smart data to facilitate their usability in providing optimized smart tourism services. One of the pressing concerns is the functional alignment of geospatial data with tourism-related data. Thus, we aim to pinpoint the growing importance of smart geospatial services, by pointing to the main downturn of the current smart destination issue with geospatial data resolutions, and, by building upon the relations of the geospatial layer of data with the tourism-specific layer. To this end, we pinpoint two further research directions - reinvestigating spatial and temporal resolution as a core of data smartness and the need for contextual (tourism-oriented) scaling of smart technology. This could be of keen interest in post-pandemic tourism, where smart geospatial services will be of pressing concern, but also it still an issue to be resolved in further smart destination development.

Research trends in technology in the context of smart destinations: a bibliometric analysis and network visualization

“…According to the results, the smart destinations model stands as a conceptual but also applied contribution based on the use of data, technology, and interaction with the smart tourism ecosystem, which results in improved public-private management according to . An example of this has been the management of the COVID-19 crisis, where smart destinations, through technological solutions of geolocation (Radojević et al 2020) and smart governance (Choi et al 2021), are oriented towards recovering trust (Sánchez-Teba et al 2020), and managing the flows of people, controlling capacity, or avoiding saturation are good means for maintaining the competitiveness of companies and making destinations safer, more reliable, and more sustainable and efficient.…”

Bibliometric and visualized review of smart tourism research

“…For example, the COVID-19 pandemic that spread worldwide in early 2020 highlighted the advantages of smart tourism, which is unrestricted by geographical distance. Therefore, the research on the role and effects of intelligent geospatial services combined with data sharing functions in tourism crises or risks (Lee et al, 2020;Radojevic et al, 2020) the Silhouette of each cluster is greater than 0.8, indicating high homogeneity within the cluster. Analyzing the nodes in Figure 2a and their corresponding label sizes, "smart tourism," "smart city," "smart tourism destination," "technology," and "social media" are the five most frequently occurring keywords.…”

“…Researchers should also constantly update their understanding of the latest related research and enrich the research summary to ensure the solid foundation of future research and accuracy of research directions (Ye et al, 2020). Simultaneously, while the Coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) pandemic has caused lasting adverse effects on the global tourism industry, it also demonstrated the competitive advantages of smart tourism infrastructure in geospatial services under the effects of the epidemic (Radojevic et al, 2020). The latter has also given rise to new requirements for the development of smart tourism.…”

A review of GIS methodologies to analyze the dynamics of COVID‐19 in the second half of 2020

“…This will tell us about the thematic evolution of GIS and spatial analysis used in COVID‐19 studies compared with the first half of 2020. As we mentioned, during the first months of the pandemic, remarkable reviews or reflections on the usefulness of these technologies and approaches for pandemic research were published (Casti, 2020 ; Collectif, 2020 ; Dangermond, De Vito, & Pesaresi, 2020 ; Devasia, Lakshminarayanan, & Kar, 2020 ; Klapka, Ellegård, & Frantál, 2020 ; Méndez, 2020 ; Radojević, Lazić, & Cimbaljević, 2020 ; Rosenkrantz, Schuurman, Bell, & Amram, 2020 ; Wolf, 2020 ; Zúñiga, Pueyo, & Postigo, 2020 ). Our goal is to provide another valuable resource for researchers applying GIS and spatial analysis to study COVID‐19.…”