In recent years, UNWTO and academics have called for the development of responsible, sustainable, and universally accessible tourism to promote equal human rights and social inclusion. Prior studies have also revealed the potential and value of smart technologies in reducing, if not removing, barriers to people with access requirements during travel and in their everyday lives. However, a guiding framework of how smart technologies assist in building an accessible destination is still absent, thereby hindering the progress of building accessible tourism. This paper aims to fill this knowledge gap. A conceptual model of smart accessible destination (SAD) was proposed drawing from the intersection of accessible tourism and smart tourism. With the guidance of this conceptual model, tourism destinations and stakeholders can recognize and utilize the synergies of accessible and smart tourism to enhance the social inclusion, competitiveness, and sustainability of a destination.

Destination marketing organizations (DMOs) utilize the official website for marketing and promotional purposes, while tourists often navigate through the official website to gather necessary information for their upcoming trips. With the advancement of business analytics, DMOs may need to exploit the clickstream data generated through their official website to develop more suitable and persuasive strategic marketing and promotional activities. As such, the primary objective of the current study is to show whether clickstream data can successfully identify the trip purposes of a particular user. Using a latent class analysis and multinomial logistic regression, this study found the meaningful and statistically significant variations in webpage visits among different trip purpose groups (e.g., weekend getaways, day-trippers, and other purposes). The findings of this study would provide a foundation for more data-centric destination marketing and management practice.

This paper shows light on the concept of smart tourism destination as a future of tourism development, especially in the context of problems associated with developing countries. This study substantiates the case of smart tourism development in mountain destinations as an affordable and needed future of the contemporary era. This conceptual study is based on secondary literature on Smart Cities, Smart Tourism Destinations, and Tourism in Himachal Pradesh. The Indian state of Himachal Pradesh has been considered as a study area to acknowledge major tourism-related challenges, especially in mountain locations. Consequently, the dots are connected between existing challenges and solutions that smart tourism holds. It turns out that for the development of mountain tourism destinations such as Himachal Pradesh in the Indian Himalayas, investments in smart infrastructure are required. By developing smart infrastructure, a new USP can be made, a supportive environment for new local businesses, new employment opportunities, enhanced tourist experience and an overall raised standard of living for locals. Considering all factors, it leads to a highly competitive tourism destination. All tourism destinations located in the Himalayan mountains show somewhat the same tourism challenges as Himachal Pradesh, India. Therefore, this paper brightens the path of destination planners towards the development agenda of smart tourism destinations and shows how smart tourism infrastructure can be deployed for better management of tourism destinations.