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Applying patent analytics to understand technological trends of smart tourism destinations

ABSTRACT Over the past decades, technological advances have deeply affected business practices and strategies of most economic sectors worldwide, including travel and tourism. Therefore, with the widespread adoption of digital technologies, the concept of smart tourism destination (STD) has become a promising approach in response to the fierce competition among tourism destinations. In general, the STD concept refers to special cases of smart cities initiatives, which builds upon the emerging technological infrastructure to enhance tourists’ experience. Since patent documents offer an ample source of knowledge about technical progress and innovative activity, this specific type of data has been used by scholars to perform in-depth temporal and comparative analyses. Hence, we retrieved patent documents addressing STD technologies from the European Patent Database, named ESPACENET. Based on the analysis of patent information, our study provides robust empirical evidence concerning the characteristics of potential innovations specifically designed for STD initiatives. Therefore, this study offers the following contributions: a longitudinal analysis of patent applications, their geographical concentration, tourism technology developers’ profile, and technology thematic dispersion. More specifically, the data demonstrates that Asian countries are responsible for the majority of STD patent applications and, therefore, are likely to lead STD technology development in the coming years.