The Tourism Experience: A Smart Tourism Ecosystem Perspective

With the tourist experience at the heart of tourism and considering that it is shaped and influenced by the interaction between supply and demand, the nature of this interaction is a fundamental concept, namely for its design, communication, and facilitation. The smart tourism ecosystem integrates (i) systems, which include actors, who exchange skills, experiences, and knowledge; (ii) institutions, which promote the integration of resources, based on a common set of social arrangements; (iii) technology, which generates and renews social arrangements. It is a reality with multiple impacts, susceptible to change in various elements of the market, such as the exchange object, actors, structure, institutions, and practices. Also in business models, it is possible to admit significant changes, at the levels of customer segments and relationships, value propositions, channels, revenue streams, resources, activities, partnerships, and cost structure. Given the above, a conceptual approach is proposed, highlighting the importance of a positively differentiating tourism experience from the perspective of a smart tourism ecosystem, considering its multi-participant structure. This will be the first stage of a broader work, where we hope to obtain far-reaching results, highlighting the importance of interaction between stakeholders, mediated by technology, capable of providing a positively differentiating tourist experience. The suggested approach has relevant implications at the management level, given the need to obtain differentiating factors, with the incorporation of added value for the parties involved, capable of achieving and renewing balances between supply and demand, using technology, which is now unavoidable.