A Conceptual Review on Smart Tourism City towards to Re-building Sri Lankan Tourism

Abstract

During the past decades, Sri Lanka has been one of the best tourist destinations in the world. Several books, authors, and websites have recently nominated that Sri Lanka is the best place to obtain a superior tourist experience. Considering Sri Lankan tourism sector has been influences by this pandemic situation in advance. Stakeholders of the tourism sector are struggling to find a new solution for the prevailing situation. At the same time, countries that are gaining several competitive advantages from the tourism sector have adopted the Smart tourism city concept. Because it is a timely concept to win this digital era, this study explored to provide a critical evaluation of literature on the Smart tourism city concept and the possibility of appalling this concept into the Sri Lankan context. A rigorous literature review is carried out by choosing conceptual and empirical papers mostly published after 2015 in reputed journals to evaluate the smart tourism cities concept discussed by many authors critically. The findings of this study provide valuable insight into the stakeholders in the Sri Lankan tourism sector to implement this concept successfully. Manly, government authorities, owners, and managers of the tourism sector should engage with digital technologies when providing their service package. Further, smart tourism cities should consider the main three pillars, namely human capital, infrastructure, and information. Not only that but also community collaboration is another critical factor that should pay attention. Further, within this study developed a model that represents the connection between several components of a smart tourism city.