COVID Crisis and the Impact on Smart Tourism, Sustainable Development and Local Communities

ABSTRACT

Tourism is one of the industries most affected by the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) crisis worldwide. Because tourism makes the largest contribution of any industry to Spain and Portugal’s gross domestic product, the crisis’s impact on local communities needs to be analysed in greater depth. This chapter details on how these communities have been affected by the pandemic and identifies which positive and negative factors influence residents’ wellbeing. The state-of-the-art of research on smart and sustainable tourism is examined, as well as on local communities’ resilience. Secondary data were gathered on Spain and Portugal to develop a fuller understanding of the phenomena under study, and the ways the COVID-19 crisis has affected these two countries’ vision of tourism. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.