Smartization of Iran's Tourism Industry: An emphasis on Social and Cultural Empowerment

The main purpose of this article was to investigate the role of social and cultural empowerment in institutionalizing smart programs of Iran's tourism industry and identify the components of smart tourism in Iran's urban destinations. As a mixed-method research, this study used contractual qualitative content analysis within its qualitative phase and a survey in its quantitative phase. As for the qualitative phase, 13 Iranian tourism managers were selected and interviewed through targeted and snowball sampling. Moreover, to conduct the quantitative phase, 390 travel agency experts were selected via convenience sampling, using Cochran's formula. The results of analyzing the data via structural equation modeling with the partial least squares approach showed that all observable and hidden variables were significant at the level of 0/05, all of which were confirmed. Furthermore, socio-cultural empowerment, smart governance, development of new smart technologies applications, and comprehensive smart tourism services were identified as components of the smart tourism industry in Iran. In addition, based on the Stone-Geisser index, the redundancy index of the social and cultural empowerment component was calculated to be 0/523 and based on its value in the final model (0/528), the strong predictive power of the model was confirmed.