Smart Tourism Design: Launching the annals of tourism research curated collection on designing tourism places

Abstract Design is now considered a crucial activity in contributing to the success of tourism enterprises as well as destinations. This article builds upon the ideas first introduced in the two edited books, namely Design Science in Tourism and Analytics in Smart Tourism Design, which brought the conceptual and methodological foundations for designing tourism places to the forefront of tourism literature. Specifically, this article first introduces the intellectual background that dates back to Clare Gunn's seminal work on Vacationscape, which has evolved into a systematic approach that incorporates tools developed in psychology, behavioral economics, marketing, management and more recently data sciences. It then describes the tourism design system as a general framework, followed by a discussion on the nature and role of smart tourism in enhancing this framework. The article then introduces the Curated Series on Tourism Design by identifying a group of articles published in the Journal which address many essential issues shaping the future of the tourism industry.