How Smart Tourism Destinations Turn Data Into Action

The word knowledge appears in every tourism strategic plan. But when we ask what kind of knowledge, what it is for, who holds it and how it circulates, the answer dissolves. This imprecision
is not harmless: managing a destination’s knowledge without distinguishing its types is like conducting an orchestra without distinguishing the instruments. The result may have the shape of a
concert, but it is not one.

The Smart Tourism Destination (SMT/DTI) model of the Ibero-American Network operates on five axes — governance, innovation, sustainability, technology and accessibility — which are, at their
core, five domains of knowledge production, circulation and application. The knowing-doing gap — the gulf between knowing and doing — is not a problem of willpower. It is a problem of poorly
managed knowledge.

Ferran Adrià, through elBulli foundation, spent years understanding how comprehension works before devoting himself to creation. His conclusion was simple: you cannot innovate in what you
have not ordered. Classifying all the elements of a discipline allows us to know what we know and what we still need to learn. In the field of STDs, that idea has a precise institutional translation:
SEGITTUR’s UNE 178503 standard, which creates a semantic representation model of tourism knowledge so that different systems can understand it as humans would. Because chaos is the enemy
of comprehension, and without comprehension there is no effective action — only activity.

The proposed taxonomy — tacit, explicit, individual, social, exponential, connected, declarative, procedural, causal, conditional, relational and pragmatic — is not an academic classification. It is a
grammar for reading the intelligence of a destination: making visible what was previously invisible, revealing relationships that non-systemic thinking cannot perceive. The 12 types are organized
around three questions.

How is knowledge expressed? The axis of form distinguishes tacit from explicit. Tacit knowledge is the kind that does not fit in a manual: genuine hospitality, the experienced manager’s
judgement, the living memory of the host community. Explicit knowledge is codified and transferable: diagnoses, indicators, action plans. Destinations that manage only explicit knowledge
end up managing their indicators instead of their reality. The UNE 178503 standard is precisely the attempt to make explicit what exists implicitly: to create vocabularies, ontologies and thesauri so that a manager’s tacit knowledge, once encoded in a system, retains its meaning.

Who holds and transfers knowledge? The axis of subject distinguishes four types. Individual knowledge resides in specific people and is the most fragile cognitive capital: when they leave, it
leaves with them. Social knowledge is distributed across the network of territorial actors and is the source of legitimacy that no external expert can replace. Exponential knowledge is produced by
artificial intelligence systems at speeds impossible for human analysis. And connected knowledge emerges from interoperability: it resides not in any single node but in the network itself, and it is
what the Ibero-American (SMT/DTI) Network produces as a regional public good when its members share methodologies and learning. A destination that builds its knowledge solely from
technicians or solely from data builds a partial understanding that inevitably produces partial decisions.

What is knowledge for? The axis of function groups six types. Declarative knowledge answers what the destination is. Procedural knowledge answers how things are done. Causal knowledge
answers why things happen as they do. Conditional knowledge answers when each intervention is viable. Relational knowledge answers with whom. Pragmatic knowledge answers the question
that closes any management process: What does all of the above actually achieve in practice? It is what converts knowing into doing, diagnosis into transformation, plan into territorial impact.

SEGITTUR defines semantics applied to tourism as the construction of a common language that humans and machines use in tourism, with an ontological model of 12 main classes. It is no
coincidence that there are 12 — the same number as the types in the proposed taxonomy. Both systems attempt to capture the complexity of tourism knowledge from complementary perspectives
— one technical, one epistemological — that together produce what neither can produce alone: a vision that is simultaneously technically interoperable and humanly comprehensible.

Tacit knowledge says: this place has a living history that fits in no indicator. Its loss is irreversible and silent: it appears in no audit, triggers no alert. It is only noticed when the destination begins to
look like every other. Individual knowledge says: someone here knows how to do this, and that knowledge is in no document. Its semantics are those of cognitive debt: what the destination loses
when it does not invest in transferring it. Political discontinuity — management teams renewed with each new administration — is the most costly form of knowledge destruction. Nobody records it as a loss, yet the destination returns, time and again, to square one.

Social knowledge says: the community knows things no outside expert can know. Participatory governance is not an abstract democratic principle: it is an epistemological strategy for accessing a
kind of knowledge that has no other channel. Exponential knowledge says: there are patterns no human analysis can detect at this scale. But it also contains the most urgent question in digital
management: who controls the system that produces this knowledge? When the algorithm belongs to an external actor, the most powerful knowledge about the territory ceases to belong to it.

The six types of the functional axis have semantics that call to one another. Declarative knowledge calls on causal: without that connection, diagnosis produces statistics without interpretation.
Procedural knowledge needs conditional to avoid becoming mechanical and context-blind.

Relational knowledge gives structure to pragmatic: knowing who you are working for determines which results matter. Separating any of these pairs is like reading a sentence with missing words: the sense can be guessed at, but the full meaning is never reached.

Semantics also operates in lexicon. A destination that speaks of tourists thinks differently from one that speaks of guests. One that calls heritage a resource thinks differently from one that calls it a
community asset. One that defines governance as public administration thinks differently from one that defines it as multi-actor articulation. Words are not labels: they are the lenses through which reality is seen. The first exercise in knowledge management in an STD is not technical: it is linguistic.

The 12-type system is activated through four spiral movements. Order means inventorying what the destination knows: what explicit knowledge exists and where, who holds the most critical tacit
knowledge, what actors know that is in no document. Classify turns that inventory into structure, revealing strengths and fragilities: a destination with abundant declarative knowledge but scarce
causal knowledge knows it does not need more data but greater capacity to interpret it. Connect produces what no single type can generate alone: declarative connected with causal produces
understanding; procedural with conditional produces practical wisdom; individual with social produces institutional culture. Understand to act closes the cycle: the objective is not diagnosis but
territorial transformation, and when action flows from understanding, the action itself generates new knowledge that restarts the spiral.

In management practice, three cycles show how types activate one another. The diagnosis–comprehension cycle connects declarative with causal: without that second operation,
diagnosis produces an inventory of gaps with no intelligence about their origin, and plans attack symptoms — the same causes return in disguise. Deep causality rarely lies in the data; it lies in the
stories the data does not capture. The decision–action cycle connects procedural, conditional and relational: a destination can have perfectly designed certification procedures and still fail because it applied them at an adverse political moment, or because it left off the table actors whose resistance blocked the process.

The transfer of good practices fails for this very reason — the procedure is transferred without transferring the context in which it works. The scale–impact cycle closes the spiral: individual knowledge becomes social through deliberate transfer, social is amplified by exponential, and the whole system is multiplied through the connected knowledge the Ibero-American DTI Network produces as a public good. Without the pragmatic closure, the destination knows a great deal and does very little.

Each phase of the (SMT/DTI) process has its own epistemic center of gravity. In diagnosis, the critical types are declarative, tacit, social and causal: the most frequent error is completing the
quantitative diagnosis without producing causal understanding. In transformation, they are procedural, conditional, relational and individual: what works in a mature institutional context can
fail in one where key actors do not yet trust one another. In distinction and projection, they are exponential, connected and pragmatic: a certification that does not transform the destination is a
photograph, not a process.

There are destinations that talk about knowledge and destinations that manage it. The former have impeccable strategic plans, updated indicators, technology platforms. The latter have something harder to build and easier to lose: a culture of systemic learning that turns every data point into a question, every procedure into a reflected experience, every institutional relationship into an opportunity to produce shared understanding. The difference is not budgetary. It is epistemological.

Adrià asked elBulli a question every tourism destination manager should ask about their territory: do we really know what we know? Not as rhetoric. As the starting point for any transformation that intends to produce something different from what already exists. Not just what do we know? but what kind of thing is each piece of knowledge we hold? Is it codified, or does it
live in people who might leave tomorrow? Is it distributed across the community or concentrated in the technical team? Do we have the precise language for these kinds of knowledge to communicate with one another, across actors, across systems?

The invitation is open: in an era that speaks endlessly of data, algorithms and platforms, the most urgent challenge facing Smart Tourism Destinations is not technological but epistemic. Not what
technology to install, but what knowledge we are destroying while we install it. How much tacit knowledge is lost when we digitise without documenting. How much social knowledge is excluded
when we automate without listening. How much collective intelligence dissolves when we optimise for the indicator instead of for the territory. A destination that knows what it knows, that classifies
that knowledge with precision, that connects it in ways that produce new understanding and acts from that understanding, holds something no technology provider can sell it and no competitor can copy: a way of learning that is its own, irreproducible and in permanent evolution. That — not the tools it uses to learn — is what makes a destination truly intelligent.

And this demands, above all, a change of mindset: in a systemic age, far removed from the logic of the industrial revolution, we must abandon the Manichean, dichotomous thinking that sets things in opposition — technology or knowledge, efficiency or community, data or people — and move towards and. Toward this and that in systemic form. Not technology instead of tacit knowledge, but technology and tacit knowledge, articulated. Not indicators instead of territory, but indicators in service of territory. Not technical governance instead of participatory governance, but a governance that integrates both because it understands that the real intelligence of a destination does not live in either of its poles, but in the systemic tension of knowledge.

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