[AISWorld] Special Issue in I&M - Smart Tourism: Traveler, Business, and Organizational Perspectives

[Jae-Nam Lee]

Information and Management

 

Special Issue on Smart Tourism: Traveler, Business, and Organizational
Perspectives

 

Guest Editors 

Chulmo Koo, College of Hotel and Tourism Management, Kyung Hee University
(South Korea) 

Jaehyun Park, Industrial Engineering and Management, Tokyo Institute of
Technology (Japan) 

Jae-Nam Lee, Korea University Business School (South Korea) 

 

Challenges and Opportunities in Smart Tourism

Smart tourism highlights digital convergence in content, device, and service
Tourism. The convergence of tourism and Information Technology (IT) has
provided a variety of new features and functions of IT-enabled products,
systems, and services in tourism and hospitality business. These
IT-innovations have led to the exceptional growth of multiple tourism and
hospitality organizations (e.g. Airbnb, Yelp, Uber, Couchsurfing and Google
Maps). As a result, these tourism-related information service and platforms
have increased the number of tourists and enabled individual travelers to
easily and efficiently manage their travelling schedule, especially as
regards their traveling patterns (e.g., preference, time, space, and
budget). However, the radically changing IT-enabled tourism and hospitality
business have encountered a variety of challenges. The main challenge is
grasping the context of tourists' behaviors, emotions, and latent factors to
create new business and service applications. Technology-enhanced tourism
may generate valuable products and services to ensure unexpected economic
growth and to contribute to the digital society. Therefore, smart tourism
significantly contributes to this phenomenon. 

 

Furthermore, technology may challenge a human-centered approach for
transforming travel behaviors and the tourism business. To address this
particular challenge, smart tourism needs to adopt a user-centered design
beyond the technology and system perspectives. Participatory design and the
design thinking approach serve as methodological directions for identifying
the complex tourists' contexts and their latent information environments.
Using these design approaches, we will elucidate not only
technology-enhanced tourism but also contextual inquiries to deal with
latent tourists' behavioral patterns, communication protocols, media
preference, and decision-making process in travel. Based on the findings of
the special issue, tourism and hospitality business and organization can
synthesize new business models and applications to migrate toward smart
tourism. 

 

Topics in Smart Tourism

The special issue's particular interest is on papers that focus on (1)
traveler-centered design: designing tourists' behaviors (2) smart tourism
business networks, and (3) service design: design contents, products,
devices, and process innovations. Understanding the changes and trends in
tourism through IT involvement and their effect on travel business can
provide valuable theoretical and practical implications to tourism industry.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

 

--- Concepts and theories of smart tourism 

--- Case studies of smart tourism

--- Technologies for design tourism 

--- Electronic brokerage and marketplaces 

--- Swarms, social network services and collective decision making

--- IT architectures and models for design tourism 

--- Design business models and the role of IT 

--- Barriers and ingredients for the developments of design smart systems

--- Acceptance, adoption, and diffusion of design tourism systems

--- Ensure privacy and security in designing tourism infrastructures

--- Effect of design technologies on traditional tourism

--- Policy, strategy, and management of design tourism

--- Design tourism business process

--- Network analysis of a networked tourism industry

--- Business intelligence for design tourism technologies and services

--- Research methods for the analysis of design tourism-related phenomena

 

Important Dates

--- Submission Period Due: From February 1, 2016 to February 28, 2016

--- First Round Decisions: May 15, 2016 

--- Major Revisions if needed: July 30, 2016 

--- Second Round Decisions: September 30, 2016 

--- Minor Revisions if needed: November 30, 2016 

--- Final Decision: December 30, 2016 

--- Publication Date: By the mid-2017 

 

Paper Submission

We welcome papers from a wide range of disciplines as well as papers based
on either quantitative or qualitative approaches. Implications of findings
for theory and practice are essential and we encourage papers that extend
existing theories.

 

All the submitted papers will go through a rigorous review process as that
for the regular paper submissions. Papers that pass the initial screening
will undergo no more than two rounds of revision. Papers not accepted by the
end of the second round of revision will be rejected. Given the tight
schedule, there will not be enough time for major revision. Therefore when
preparing your submission, it is strongly required to try your best to make
your paper publishable as it is.

 

Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished papers. All
submissions will be peer-reviewed and judged on correctness, originality,
significance, quality of presentation, and relevance to the special issue
topics of interest. Submitted papers may not have appeared in or be under
consideration for another journal. Authors are instructed to follow the
Guide for Authors and submission guidelines for the journal at the journal's
website,
http://www.elsevier.com/journals/information-and-management/0378-7206/guide-
for-authors, and to choose "Special Issue: Smart Tourism" as the paper type
in the online submission system.

 

Further enquiries about the special issue can be directed to Chulmo Koo
(helmetgu at khu.ac.kr), Jaehyun Park (park.j.ai at m.titech.ac.jp) or Jae-Nam Lee
(isjnlee at korea.ac.kr).