Digital Platforms as a Holistic Approach to Improve Sustainability in Tourism

Digital platforms are increasingly presented as instruments for sustainable tourism governance, yet destinations often remain data-rich and governance-poor: digital traces are dispersed across actors, indicators are weakly standardised and communities frequently lack meaningful access to the information that shapes destination decisions. This article addresses this problem through the conceptual design and preliminary formative evaluation of ORVE (Optimisation of Resources and Valorisation of Experiences), a destination-level platform designed to connect tourists and residents, companies and institutions and Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) through a circular data ecosystem, understood as feedback loops across stakeholder levels. Methodologically, the study adopts Design Science Research (DSR). It operationalises problem identification, definition of solution objectives, artefact design and development, preliminary demonstration and formative evaluation, while recognising that full-scale causal evaluation remains a future research stage. The empirical component draws on a real-world pre-test with 12 tourism companies mediated by Biosphere Portugal, two Biosphere-administered pilot-company surveys involving 58 and 52 companies and scenario-based testing by 14 student groups involving more than 60 final-year students from Tourism and Tourism and Hospitality Management programmes. These sources are interpreted as exploratory and formative evidence rather than as a representative adoption study or a causal impact evaluation. The results suggest perceived usefulness for structuring sustainability information, supporting indicator monitoring and informing decision making, while also revealing operational constraints related to usability, data-entry flexibility, privacy communication, validation mechanisms, data availability in micro and small enterprises and the need for close onboarding support. The article contributes a refined platform architecture, a governance requirements matrix, design principles, an operationalisation roadmap and an evaluation protocol for sustainable tourism platform governance.