Social, Ethical, and Moral Issues in Smart Tourism Development in Destinations

Abstract

Smart tourism research and development have mainly focused on the benefits of smart tourism technologies to certain stakeholders with transactional relationships in destinations. However, smart technologies in destinations could also cause several negative outcomes, leading to social, ethical, and moral issues. Such issues arise from the power imbalance between different stakeholders of smart tourism development. To mitigate the adverse effects of smart technologies, destinations need to enunciate the essential moral and ethical principles when developing smart tourism. Therefore, adopting descriptive and normative approaches to stakeholder theory, this paper proposes a framework to showcase several methods to address the issues.