The influence of smart tourism on tourist's destination choice in the city of Tshwane, South Africa

Abstract

Countries across the globe are relying on tourism growth and development for creation of employment and contribution to the country’s GDP. Societies have always been subject to change. Modern society has been increasingly changing and the changes are being brought about by the growth, development and innovation within the ICT sector. Such growth and development of ICT has created the birth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution of which has resulted in the proliferation of the word ‘smart’. Technology has thus successfully penetrated people’s communication patterns, consumption habits, lifestyles and work place relations, moreover it has also impacted the context of travel and tourist behavior. The concept of smartness gained its popularity in early 2000s and has somehow resulted in the creation and usage of concepts such as smart city, smart planet, smart tourism and smart tourist. The growth of ICT has therefore resulted in the growth of Smart Tourism Technologies which are developed to meet smart tourist’s demands. The city of Tshwane has been making strides to become an African World-class Smart City. Such then offers the city of Tshwane to position itself as a smart tourism destination that can meet the demands of smart tourists. Prior to such positioning efforts, research needs to be conducted to ascertain if tourists visiting the city use smart tourism technologies to make travel the decision to visit the city, such was the core problem of the study. To investigate the influence of smart tourism technologies on tourist’s decision to visit the city of Tshwane, the study adapted and made revisions to the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion as a conceptual theory that can explain attitude changes of tourists through the usage of Smart Tourism Technologies. The study adopted a quantitative approach wherein a questionnaire with 29 seven-point Likert scales was used. Data was analyzed through SPSS Amos® Version 25. A total of 341 questionnaires were collected and Structural Equation Modelling was used to investigate the influence of smart tourism technologies on tourist’s decision. The findings of the study revealed that Information relevance and interactivity of smart tourism technologies significantly influence the decision of tourists to visit the city of Tshwane, which therefore critically suggest that the decision to visit the city of Tshwane is greatly influenced by consulting smart tourism tools that are interactive and carries relevant tourist information. It is envisaged that the findings of the study could be consulted when designing smart tourism tools that could be used in positioning the city as a smart tourism destination.