Smart Destination Branding for Sustainable Tourism

Dear Colleagues,

Destinations all around the world compete to attract tourists and expect to benefit from tourists’ economic, socio-cultural, and environmental contribution to the destination. These benefits should last long term, without taking away from the resources reserved for the future generation while meeting the needs of the current generation. The attraction should not be short-sighted for the growth and development of the destination, and therefore every planning and development decision should consider the impact on sustainability. As essential as it is to create a sustainable tourism environment, it is also critical for destinations to have competitive advantages. Building a strong, favorable, unique, and positive destination brand serves as a useful strategy in the current competitive market environment. Thus, it becomes important to understand how effectively destinations can communicate with potential markets. With a variety of ICT technology and social media networks (SNS) available, destinations now have adopted smart branding, which wholly embraces the smart digital business environment. The long-lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has made it even more significant now for destinations to incorporate sustainable tourism and smart tourism. Therefore, this Special Issue calls for papers that offer insight into how the smart business environment contributes to sustainable tourism in an economic, socio-cultural, political, and environmental manner. This Special Issue welcomes theoretical, empirical, case study, critical review, and meta-analysis studies.

Topics

• Use of ICT and SNS for branding of sustainable tourism;
• Innovative analysis on sustainable tourism;
• Destination marketing and promotion of sustainable tourism with smart approaches;
• Smart use of tourism resources in destinations;
• Use and effect of branding of sustainable certification, credential, and eco-, and green-labels;
• Big data in sustainable destination and destination branding ;
• Smart destination resilience strategies for a sustainable future;
• Smart tourism and destination recovery;
• Sustainable tourism and recovery marketing.

Prof. Hany Kim
Prof. Bingjie Liu-Lastres
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• smart branding
• branding sustainable destination
• smart destination and sustainable practice