How Smart is your Tourism? Designing a Maturity Model for Lesser-Known Mountain Resorts

• Main Authors: Emmanuel Fragniere, Dominique Fumeaux, Michael Fux, Sandra Grezes, Alain Imboden
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: FRUCT 2020-09-01
• Series: Proceedings of the XXth Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT
• Subjects: digitalization; smart tourism; digital maturity; service design
• Online Access: https://www.fruct.org/publications/acm27/files/Fux.pdf

The development of smart cities has brought enormous benefits for the improvement of services such as transport, energy, online public services and the monitoring of their use. At the same time, in the context of tourism, the concept of smart destinations also offers advantages in mountain resorts, for example by facilitating customer journeys of tourists who discover the region, by enhancing their stay through the use of smart technology and by providing them with accurate and tailored information. However, it seems that only the very high-end mountain destinations have benefited from these advantages. Indeed, becoming an intelligent destination requires significant investment, digital expertise and a culture of innovation. In this research, we are looking at small, lesser-known Swiss mountain destinations for which going ""smart"" is currently challenging. In this article, we present a new tool for diagnosing ""smart"" maturity which, thanks to information and communication technologies, enables us to focus above all on the weak links that significantly affect the customers' journeys (e.g. missing the last shuttle after skiing in order to be able to return to their hotel). Applying this tool will enable such destinations to identify ways to become a smart destination that are adapted to their scale and characteristics and that will allow them to remain competitive towards more established and larger destinations.