A Technology-Based Innovation Adoption and Implementation Analysis of European Smart Tourism Projects: Towards a Smart Actionable Classification Model (SACM)

Similar to the concept of “Smart Cities”, “Smart Tourism” has undoubtedly become a promising field of research, and “the” buzzword in the last five years. But how much of this is “smart washing”, and how much progress has really been made? We focus on the adoption and implementation of technological innovations to analyze the publicly available descriptions of Smart Tourism projects implemented in Europe according to the stringent technological criteria of contemporary Smart Tourism definitions. The results show that the vast majority of projects branded as “smart” predominantly pursue environmental sustainability goals, but do not feature advanced technology that meets the Smart Actionable attribute criteria, and do not address social sustainability issues to the same extent as the environmental ones.