YanBin Zheng, HongLei Bao, Siyu Gao
The worlds tourism and hospitality sector is undergoing a significant paradigm change due to the fast development of information and communication technology. The new operational framework generally referred to as Smart Tourism is an end-to-end transformation through which physical infrastructure, digital connectivity and real-time operational data are combined together in order to enhance the experience of visitors, improve the efficiency of resources and increase the organisational flexibility. In contrast with the initial digital tourism efforts mainly based on static web presence and simple online booking engines, smart tourism relies on an ecosystem of interconnected Internet of Things sensors, cloud computing environments, high-speed mobile communications and artificial intelligence analytics.The use of smart sensing is the heart of this change. It is through these smart systems, such as computer vision programs, radio-frequency identification devices, environmental monitoring tools, spatial heat-mapping, and other types of digital interfaces that are sensitive to the sentiment of a person or an organization, which can constantly gather information on high-frequency activities and behaviors. But in spite of the fact that tourism businesses (including scenic attractions with integrated operations, luxury hotel chains, online travel agencies, and even destination management organizations) have been spending millions of dollars to obtain these capabilities, there exists a gap between the structure of the business and the technology it has.The conventional organizational structures in tourism are by nature inflexible, bureaucratic and siloed in terms of functions. They were created to work in a static environment where the decision-making process was based on predictable top-down administrative chains that took days or weeks. When high-velocity real-time sensing data is fed into a legacy hierarchy, information bottlenecks will inevitably choke the pipeline of decisions.The smart tourism is the organizational paradox of the modern world, which means that it has no sense to have high-level capabilities of smart sensing as long as the organization is not able to take in, process and respond to the information on a real-time basis with the same level of operation speed. The optimization of the structure of organizations and their structural alignment to smart sensing technologies can no longer be an IT upgrade but rather a survival factor of operations and competitive differentiation of organizations in the digital age.