The experience co-creation in smart tourism destinations: a multiple case analysis of European destinations

In the last years, destinations have started to redefine their role and their entrepreneurial logics, involving tourists as active co-creators of their own experiences and considering new technologies as the main tools for defining tourism products. It implies the birth of a new kind of destinations, the smart tourism destinations (STDs), in which new technologies are so extensively embedded to influence tourism experiences, enhance destinations’ competitiveness and favour tourism development projects. Starting from these considerations, the main purpose of this paper is to contribute to the recent debate on innovation in tourism, by proposing an interpretative framework able to explain the way in which technological components in a STD may improve the co-creation of tourism experiences. Empirical analysis on two European STD best practices, Venice and Salzburg, conducted triangulating qualitative methods, reveals that the smart approach adopted by STDs improves the co-creation of tourism experiences by encouraging the interaction with tourists, increasing their active participation during the experience, and promoting the sharing of the experience among the tourists themselves. The paper provides interesting insights for destination managers and policy makers on how they should use innovative technologies in STDs to improve the experience co-creation. © 2016, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.