Contextualizing the interplay of community resilience and digital technologies to create sustainable destinations: two complementary cases

We live in times where natural disasters, inter-state conflicts and health scares, among others, pose significant challenges to the safety and security of tourism destinations. The rapid variability of climate also continues to be a growing threat for disruption to tourism. Understanding how to enhance community resilience in tourism destinations becomes critical in such a context. Intricately woven into the social fabric of societies, digital technologies (DTs) are becoming a new paradigm of community resilience, aiming to contribute to sustainable tourism destinations, and calling for community resilience centered destination offerings, operations and governance models. Although community resilience and DTs are two emerging topics, the interplay of these two has remained under-researched., This chapter demonstrates how digital tools function as catalysts for driving tourism communities toward enhanced resilience, further serving as a long-term enabler of sustainable tourism development. While the first case study relates to an action research intervention that focuses on the economic aspect of community resilience through DTs aimed inclusion and legitimacy of a local fishing community in a Maltese coastal village, the second case study relates to a regional tourism project that centers on the social aspect of community resilience in the Irish and Welsh coastal uplands, and demonstrates how a different tourism governance model toward regenerative tourism can be developed through utilizing DTs to prioritize the needs of the local communities.