Smart Office & Smart Tourism Destination Management System, Murcia
Cities Forum supported the City of Murcia in the design of its "Smart Office", a dedicated management body and system to drive the city's conversion into a Smart Tourism Destination (Destino Turístico Inteligente, DTI).
Year: 2022–2023 | Client: Ayuntamiento de Murcia (with SEGITTUR) | Country: Spain (Región de Murcia)
Cities Forum supported the City of Murcia in the design of its "Smart Office", a dedicated management body and system to drive the city's conversion into a Smart Tourism Destination (Destino Turístico Inteligente, DTI). Framed within the Plan de Sostenibilidad Turística en Destinos and funded through the NextGenerationEU recovery programme, the assignment followed the diagnosis and improvement plan produced with Spain's national tourism-technology agency, SEGITTUR, and gave Murcia the operational mechanism needed to turn that diagnosis into sustained action.
Our approach
The Smart Office was conceived as the coordinating engine of Murcia's DTI transformation: a body responsible for project coordination, execution and monitoring, the integration and reporting of tourism-intelligence data, participation in the national DTI destinations network, technology watch, funding search, and support to local tourism businesses. Cities Forum's design envisaged a technological DTI management platform integrating destination and tourism-intelligence data from multiple sources, connecting to Murcia's existing smart-city platform and to a planned tourism-intelligence system, so that decisions could be grounded in continuously updated evidence.
What we delivered
A second, structuring objective was to prepare the city for certification under the UNE 178501 standard for Smart Tourism Destination management systems, built around its five pillars of governance, innovation, technology, universal accessibility and sustainability. Cities Forum's work products took the form of the technical and administrative specifications (pliegos) and the descriptive and justification memoranda that defined and framed the Smart Office actuation for procurement, translating strategic ambition into an implementable, financeable and standards-aligned brief.
Impact
The engagement equipped Murcia with a clear institutional and technological blueprint to manage its tourism destination intelligently, coordinate DTI projects across departments, and progress towards formal certification, anchoring the city's tourism strategy in governance and data rather than isolated initiatives. It reinforced Cities Forum's expertise at the intersection of smart cities, tourism intelligence and destination management, and its role as a trusted technical partner to Spanish municipalities navigating the DTI framework and European recovery funding.
