FRAMEWORK FOR GOVERNANCE LEVELS CLASSIFICATION IN SMART TOURISM DESTINATIONS: A CONCEPTUAL THEORETICAL APPROACH
Governance Levels. Smart tourism destinations. Governance processes. Continuous improvement models. DMO
The contemporary societies are becoming increasingly digital, many travelers use these technologies on their smart devices massively, tourism organizations, whether public or private, must also go to the smart world, business is turning into software, companies that own systems information, can react faster and make better decisions. In this context, tourism is beginning to adapt to this new reality that the digital world has promoted, with the emergence of intelligent tourist destinations, adapted to a new fully digital environment, which begins to be dominated by products and services provided by smart technologies. Countries like Spain and China have been committed to these trends for some years and are focusing their efforts on developing these types of places. The objective of this work is to elaborate a framework for the classification of governance levels in smart tourist destinations, based on an evolutionary scale of five levels of improvement in governance processes. The methodology used in this study started with a systematic review of the literature based on the Kitchenham (2007) protocol for software engineering but adapted for tourism and confirmed the existence of a theoretical gap in the area of governance models for tourist destinations. The methodological procedures comprise documentary research, where from a dialectical approach, international standards on governance were sought for destination management models to be analyzed qualitatively. The Carnegie-Mellon University CMM was chosen as the basis for adapting the resulting framework to the concepts of tourism destination governance, Scrum was also adapted to the scientific methodology of the academy in order to carry out the methodological procedures that comprised documentary research in a reflective process constant. Then the framework's features were listed, broken down into tasks and resulted in elaborate artifacts that were gradually integrated. The research is characterized as exploratory and descriptive. The results present a structure in 5 layers of continuous improvement of governance in smart tourist destinations.