Evaluating tourism digital ecosystems: a knowledge management approach to enhance inner areas

In the Italian context, inner rural and mountain areas suffer from depopulation, an ageing population, a lack of services, and extreme seasonal tourism. In order to counteract this phenomenon, the Italian National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) identifies sustainable tourism as a promising accelerator of local development, along with agricultural and food production, renewable energy supply chain, and handicraft. In particular, in this paper the new 24 Italian mountain inner areas, selected by SNAI in the second programming cycle (2021-2027), were considered case studies representing challenging contexts for the development and implementation of innovative and sustainable cultural tourism ecosystems through digital services. More specifically, this work analyses a set of web platforms to identify the best practices in cultural and experiential tourism, their lacks and their main features and thus support both public and private bodies in New Product Development (NPD) processes of digital tourist services aimed to enhance and promote specific territorial contexts. A 5-phase knowledge management approach is proposed to evaluate different tourism digital ecosystems that foster the enjoyment of specific sites and territories by disseminating the knowledge on them, providing different tourist experiences and improving their tourist vocation. The evaluation procedure is an iterative circular process based on three steps aimed at analysing the digital ecosystems' objectives and the quality of a series of features characterising them. Applying the proposed knowledge management approach to the preidentified case studies highlighted that most new Italian mountain inner areas still need an innovative and sustainable cultural tourism ecosystem. Still, two best practices among the selected platforms were identified, reaching very high scores both for their objectives and the quality levels of their features. Results showed that most of the considered web platforms present high-quality showcases of places, offered experiences, and relatively good communicative and informative aspects. On the contrary, the features with the lowest quality levels are the active profiling tools and the presence of written interviews, testimonies and videos with people who tell their stories.