Hospitality students, academic integrity, and practical application

Abstract

A concept of smart tourism has been popularised in tourism research in the past decade. Smart tourism emphasises the application of information and communication technology to enhance tourist experience and ensure sustainability of tourist destinations. The word smart is traditionally used as synonym of ‘clever’ or ‘intelligent’ and an antonym of ‘stupid’. Therefore, this paper aims to conceptualise various manifestations of stupid tourism. The present paper applies framework developed by Cipolla (1987) in The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. The framework places all people on two axes: losses/benefits to themselves and losses/benefits to others, thus resulting in four quadrants. Considering that tourism can be viewed from demand perspective as an activity undertaken by tourists, the paper first discusses examples of stupid tourists. It then takes a view of tourism as a business to provide examples of stupid tourism businesses. Lastly, tourism is viewed from the planning and development perspective by adopting the framework to identify stupid destinations. Such conceptualisation contributes to studies of taxonomy of tourism. Moreover, we propose several explanations for stupid tourism from the psychology perspective.