Evaluating a Human-Centered Smart Tourism Framework for Sustainable Marine Destinations: A PLS-SEM Approach

This study evaluates a human-centered smart tourism framework for sustainable marine destinations. It addresses the need for remote marine destinations to pursue digital transformation through systems that are not only technologically oriented but also environmentally responsible and socially grounded. The proposed framework integrates smart tourism logic with blue economy principles to support more adaptive and sustainability-oriented tourism governance. A quantitative survey approach was used to examine the relationships among smart tourism readiness, perceived sustainability value, perceived usefulness, adoption intention, and perceived destination competitiveness. The results show that stakeholder evaluations are shaped by both technology-related readiness and sustainability-oriented value. Perceived usefulness serves as a key mechanism linking stakeholder perceptions to adoption intention, while sustainability value contributes to both perceived usefulness and destination competitiveness. These findings indicate that smart tourism frameworks are more likely to gain stakeholder support when they are perceived as practically beneficial, sustainability-oriented, and aligned with local marine development priorities. This study contributes by extending technology acceptance logic to a destination-level context and by integrating smart tourism, sustainability, and competitiveness into a single empirical model. It also offers practical insight for tourism governance by showing that successful digital transformation in marine tourism depends not only on technological preparedness but also on stakeholder support and sustainability alignment.