Development of Evaluation Readiness Model for Smart Tourism Destination

Smart tourism destination is a technology and information implementation in destinations of a territory /city. Behind the large investment spent on developing a smart tourism destination, many smart tourism destination projects have failed. One of the reasons is because the factors that must be prepared for smart tourism destination development is unclear. This paper aims to develop an evaluation readiness model for the smart tourism destinations initiation. There has not been research on the readiness model for smart tourism development yet. However, this model is needed to help the transformation of a destination into a smart tourism destination so that it can run well and sustainably. Literature studies were conducted to obtain various evaluation models on smart tourism, tourism destination management, and smart cities, which were then extracted into smart tourism destination readiness dimensions using comparative analysis. Considering that technology and information play a major role in a smart tourism destination, an alignment mapping between the identified dimensions and the technology and information governance components was carried out. The smart tourism destination dimensions identified become the basis of the formation of the smart tourism destination readiness evaluation model. Model validation is carried out with tourism stakeholders to ensure the model’s suitability to real stakeholder needs using method triangulation qualitatively and quantitatively. Thematic Analysis is used as qualitative method and text classification using SVM algorithm is used as quantitative method.