Assessing barriers to smart tourism cities from a TALC perspective: a best-worst method

A Smart tourism city (STC) is a smart city that includes tourism in its strategy, concurrently enhancing the quality of the tourist’s experience, the quality of life for residents and mitigating urban challenges. Although the literature shows STC applications and benefits, there is a lack of studies analysing and assessing the managerial and organisational barriers to STC development for different levels of tourism development. Thus, we address this literature gap by conducting a best-worst method with 40 experts. The method allows for identifying and ranking the various STC barriers for different levels of tourism development, i.e. early and late cycles, based on the tourism area life cycle model. The consequent rankings are eventually compared. The results show seven barriers to STC development that have different rankings for the early and late cycles of tourism development. The most important barrier is the lack of a clear STC strategy for both levels of tourism development. In contrast, the least important barrier is the lack of smart infrastructure for the early cycle and the lack of smart development standards for the late cycle.