Special section on generative smart tourism systems and management: Man machine interaction
Tourists today can search information on their target regions, estinations, restaurants, and entertainment programs in realime, and often choose the places where people share their xperiences (Oliveira and Carlos, 2016) With the advent of smart echnologies, tourism is moving towards a new era that includes n 'on demand economy' and a 'sharing economy. These new henomena are based on Information and Communication Techologies (ICT) which have a significant influence on the operating ethods and processes involved in current travel related indusries (e.g. AirBnB.com, Couchsufing.com, and Uber.com) (Gretzel, oo, Sigala, Xiang, 2015) The on demand economy implies instantaneousness" and "transparency" (Forbes.com, 2015) Varous applications enable the processing of travelers' requests nstantly and transparently. Travelers can decide while they are on he move, such as "booking a hotel room" as they simultaneously heck hotel room availability and prices. Conversely, the sharing conomy focuses specifically on allowing the sharing of assets (e.g. ouses, cars, parking lots, etc. thereby enabling a collaborative onsumption (Economist.com, 2013) This peer to peer rental has ecome cheaper and more convenient when facilitated by new echnologies. These phenomena have opened a new paradigm in he tourism industry, called 'smart tourism. Explicitly, we can state hat smart means "optimized for a specific need" (Gretzel, Sigala, iang, Koo, 2015) supplied by individual assets in a specific conext either on demand or real time basis. With the growth of innovative businesses in tourism, travelelated activities and electronic commerce certainly require an nfrastructure, such as knowledge based systems and management Werthner and Ricci, 2004) cloud computing (Gretzel, Sigala et al. 015) re engineering processes (Law, Buhalis, Cobanoglu, 2014) nd smart tourism systems (Werthner, Koo, Gretzel, Lamsfus, 015) Because of the new systematic approach, tourism businesses re becoming more affordable. Werthner et al. (2015) stated that mart tourism should be understood as having the overall ingreients of smartness and systems integration with machine and anagement. We also assert that the notion of smart tourism ystems and management lies in digital networks, platforms, and evices that integrate current systems, connected technologies and achines for anyone, anywhere, and anytime while all travel rel
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