This Special Issue addresses relations between tourism activities, smart specialization strategies, and sustainable development at different territorial levels, including the local, regional, national, and international. Framed by appropriate conceptual frameworks to define the contemporary dynamics of innovation in tourism, case studies supported by advanced quantitative methods and developed in rural and urban areas of Asia, Europe, and Africa are presented and discussed. The concept of smart specialization inspires the formulation of regional innovation policies and strategies, emphasizing the importance of endogenous resources and existing territorial capabilities. By exploring the diversity and variety of each economy to develop inter-sectoral relations, this approach aims at promoting the creation of spillover effects of innovation processes supported by adequate key enabling technologies, potentially leading to the sustainable development of places, regions, and countries. As an activity that mobilizes contributions from different economic sectors, tourism may play a central role in such strategies. As described and discussed in this Special Issue, aspects related to the creative sectors of economies, information and communication technologies, traditional products and lifestyles, food production, or diverse cultural values can be mobilized to generate innovative and sustainable solutions for tourism development.

As hyper-personalization has yet to be perfected, developing hyper-personalized strategies presents a critical challenge; due to this, optimizing hyper-personalization and designing new processes and business models takes center stage in tourism and hospitality to reach new levels of customer service and experience through the introduction and development of new solutions supported in the internet of things, software interfaces, artificial intelligence solutions, back-end and front-end management tools, and other emergent business intelligence strategies. Optimizing Digital Solutions for Hyper-Personalization in Tourism and Hospitality serves as an essential reference source that emphasizes the importance of hyper-personalization models, processes, strategies, and issues within tourism and hospitality fields with a particular focus on digital IT solutions. More than a simple starting point for a critical reflection on the state of the art of this sector, this book aims to contribute in an objective way to leveraging digital solutions to optimize the concept of hyper-personalization in the tourist experience. The content of this book covers research topics that include digital tourism and hospitality, consumer behavior, customer journey, and smart technologies and is ideal for professionals, executives, hotel managers, event coordinators, restaurateurs, travel agents, tour directors, policymakers, government officials, industry professionals, researchers, students, and academicians in the fields of tourism and hospitality management, marketing, and communications.

• The aim of this Special Issue is to examine the current major topics concerning the use of social media and big data in sustainable tourism practices and to encourage interdisciplinary discussion among researchers regarding these issues. • This Special Issue covers all relevant areas of the debate, including 15 selected papers based on the following core ideas: smart tourism and big data, social media in the tourism industry, and online reviews and tourist behaviors. • This Special Issue discusses wide-ranging topics and research questions with regard to the smart tourism city, the impact of social media, online reviews, and tourist behaviors, and it represents a call to action for scholars to engage with broader social issues.

This monograph presents the experience in the implementation of smart specialization strategies (S3) from multilevel policy governance, as well as from the bottom-up perspectives of firms, clusters, and networks in selected European countries. The presented research focuses on relevance and feasibility of the S3 adoption, emphasizing the importance of linking policy considerations with partnerships at lower governance levels. The major contribution of the presented research rests in theoretical implications and practical recommendations relevant for the implementation of regional S3 in the European context, with the possibility of place-based adoption in other environments. The book is also valuable for synthesizing the most recent advancements in smart specialization as a policy concept and the concept of transformation and growth for territorial units and economic entities. This book aims to further diffuse and expand the academic community’s learning of the new S3 approach in Europe and beyond. The book will be of interest and useful to the academic community of researchers and doctoral students focused on regional innovation development and related policy, as well as on entrepreneurship, networks, and clusters. Public sector professionals dealing with regional development, regional innovation policies, and industrial transformation will also benefit from its content.

Welfare rise, spatial mobility, and global information and communication channels (in particular, social media) have prompted the emergence of a specific booming and rapidly growing mobility industry all over the world, namely tourism. The tourist sector (including recreation and leisure activities) has turned into a complex contemporaneous socio-economic and geographic phenomenon, with a multiplicity of travel motives (e.g., entertainment, culture, relaxed life style, wellness, nature, etc.) and with a wide variety of impacts (e.g., urban- and regional-economic effects, crowding phenomena, environmental decay, etc.). Time has now come to offer a synthesis of the analytical apparatus in tourism research, with particular attention for system-wide, socio-economic and environmental dimensions of this important global industry. Tourism has in the past been a largely neglected field in regional science research. And therefore, it is laudable that João Romão has taken the decision to compose a systematically designed and well crafted monograph on the socio-economic, environmental and spatial dimensions of modern tourism. It offers a wealth of analytical insights and quantitative research tools for advanced tourism studies. It also fills an important gap in the current regional science literature. Peter Nijkamp, Tinbergen Institute, Amsterdam

This open access book is the proceedings of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT)’s 28th Annual International eTourism Conference, which assembles the latest research presented at the ENTER21@yourplace virtual conference January 19–22, 2021. This book advances the current knowledge base of information and communication technologies and tourism in the areas of social media and sharing economy, technology including AI-driven technologies, research related to destination management and innovations, COVID-19 repercussions, and others. Readers will find a wealth of state-of-the-art insights, ideas, and case studies on how information and communication technologies can be applied in travel and tourism as we encounter new opportunities and challenges in an unpredictable world.

This Special Issue on 'Sustainability and Visitor Management in Tourist Historic Cities' explores new trends and methods that contribute to sustainable practices for tourism planning and management in historic cities. Thanks to the differentiated approaches adopted by the authors, the Special Issue reflects on the environmental, physical, cultural, and social effects that tourism activity provokes in tourist historic cities. Considering the present debate on tourism in historic cities, there is a special focus on resident perceptions and the social problems and conflicts associated with various tourist activities that have emerged in recent years. New methodologies and sources to measure tourism impacts are also addressed in this book, especially the use of big data technology, another relevant topic. Papers include one literature review and six case studies in the historic cities of Seville and Toledo (Spain), Venice and Matera (Italy), and Porto (Portugal) and Popayán (Colombia). This Special Issue provides practical tools and policy recommendations to measure tourism impacts and promote sustainable management in tourist historic cities.