Trust Infrastructure for BCG Tourism SMEs in Southern Thailand: Digital Credibility, Local Proof, and Sustainable Destination Value

Abstract

This academic article aims to develop a management science framework for tourism SMEs in Southern Thailand under Thailand’s Bio-Circular-Green (BCG) economy model. It proposes trust infrastructure as the managerial capability through which small firms make service promises verifiable, digital transactions fair, sustainability claims credible, and service failures recoverable. The article uses conceptual synthesis rather than empirical testing because the problem is one of theoretical integration: BCG tourism policy specifies sustainability objectives, smart tourism research addresses technology-enabled coordination, and service-quality research addresses encounter-level reliability, but these streams do not jointly explain how tourism SMEs coordinate sustainability claims, digital information, transactions, service delivery, and recovery as one trust capability. Conceptual synthesis is therefore used to bridge these theoretical disconnects and define an integrative construct that can later be operationalized and empirically tested. It integrates organizational trust, relationship marketing, service quality, stakeholder theory, technology adoption, information asymmetry and signaling, smart tourism governance, and recent tourism literature on digital information, platform reviews, payment behaviour, and sustainable destination value. The gap addressed is that BCG tourism policy, smart tourism research, and service-quality literature often treat sustainability, digital credibility, and operational reliability as separate problems, while tourism SMEs must manage them simultaneously in the same visitor experience. The article translates this gap into five interdependent pillars: information verifiability, service consistency, transaction fairness, BCG credibility, and recovery-based learning. Southern Thailand provides the contextual anchor because island-and-mainland tourism systems depend on fragmented small operators, ferry links, online listings, payment instructions, environmental rules, and community consent. The contribution is a practical but theory-grounded model that can guide SME audits, public-sector templates, university-supported training, and future empirical measurement. The limitation is conceptual: the framework requires validation through tourist surveys, SME interviews, platform-review analysis, resident studies, and local case research before causal claims can be made.