Smart Tourism and Worklife Balance: Investigating the Intersection between Technology-based Destinations and Employee Welfare

Abstract

The adoption of digital technologies in tourism is going fast and places are becoming smart tourism ecosystems that are efficient, connected, and provide services in real time. The current literature on smart tourism focuses on what tourists go through, but very minimal studies ask how these transformations impact the employees. Collected data on 525 employees who are employed in smart tourism settings. The study to test the hypothesized relationships to determine whether employee well-being is a mediating factor. The findings reveal that smart tourism influenced by employee well-being. The mediation analysis supports the assumption that the employee well-being is one of the factors that explain the effectiveness of smart tourism practices in enhancing work-life balance. These results indicate that smart tourism projects assist the maintaining a life not only by making work more efficient and flexible but also enhancing mental and emotional well-being. The research indicates that leaders in the tourism industry ought to integrate technology with people-caring  practices in order to attain sustainable results. It is a contribution to the increasing body of literature on smart tourism that is concerned with the employee dimension of sustainability and provides useful recommendations to managers and policymakers who are interested in developing balanced and inclusive smart tourism ecosystems.