Smart City, Smart Tourism

Destinations fiercely compete against each other to attract investments, to maintain and attract a highly qualified labour force, and, also, to be attractive and popular tourism destinations. In this context, it is essential for destinations to be innovative. Technological developments and their adoption have impacted the development of tourism destinations. Economic growth, technological advancement, and the orientation towards sustainability contribute to the enhancement of the local economies’ development and to the provision of jobs for well-prepared and skilled employees, respectively, to develop smartly and to attract smart tourists. Once the concepts of smart destinations and smart tourism were clarified, the authors focused on evaluating the smart development of Romanian cities. Mixed methods were used to collect data (desk research and website analyses) and to verify the existence of an impact of smart transformation on Romania’s tourist activity (one-way two-tailed ANOVA). The main findings led to the conclusion that the growing number of arrivals positively impacts the smart development of Romanian destinations. At the same time, smart development increases overnight stays. Arrivals are stimulated by the existence of tourism apps. The formulation of strategic plans and their implementation have proven a strong positive impact on both tourist arrivals and overnight stays in the 41 researched cities. Furthermore, urban destinations are trendsetters in the case of Romanian tourism and those destinations that have put more effort into smart development begin to harvest the first positive results but, at the same time, significant back-lags and disparities have been noticed when comparing the performance of Romanian cities to that of other EU smart cities.