https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2360633
This brief commentary develops an argument for a critical geopolitics of smart tourism. Several critical geopolitical issues related to smart tourism deserve more attention in tourism studies, including the digital infrastructuralization of tourism in the context of platformization and data governance geopolitics. The commentary focuses on smart tourism as a new paradigm in digitally mediated tourism, one which shifts the conversation regarding the digital geographies of tourism from controlling the transboundary flow of digital information to controlling physical spaces that have themselves become digitally platformized. The commentary also focuses on China as a paradigmatic site of smart tourism development and promotion. Here, the geopolitical issues swirling around smart tourism can be seen quite clearly. The commentary concludes with the observation that the digital infrastructuralization of tourism introduces not just a new layer of geopolitical issues to account for in the tourism encounter with places, but also technopolitical effects that also shape that encounter in important ways.
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