Revealing privacy concerns by designing a conceptual framework for smart tourism

Smart Tourism is the fastest-growing source of economy and data lies at the core of all Smart Tourism activities as tourists engage in different and personalized touristic services pre/during/post traveling. This massive chunk of information gathered via a plethora of Smart Tourism Technologies is becoming an increasing concern. This may lead tourists to engage in privacy-protective behavior such as limiting data disclosure, data fabrication, or hesitating to share requested information. Therefore, service providers motivate users to share personal data by using persuasive tourism marketing elements and exposing users to persuasive messages that are based on the application of Cialdini’s strategies. To extend privacy concerns research in smart tourism, this study proposes and validates a framework based on the Antecedents - Privacy Concerns Outcome (APCO) framework to investigate the influence of user characteristics and Cialdinis’ persuasion strategies utilized by tourism organizations or service providers and how they will affect users’ willingness to share personal information.