Purpose: In the 4th industrial revolution, services that incorporate various smart technologies in the tourism sector have begun to gain popularity. Accordingly, academic discussions on smart tourism have also started to become active in various fields. Despite recent research, the definition of smart tourism is still ambiguous, and it is not easy to differentiate its scope or characteristics from traditional tourism concepts. Thus, this study aims to analyze the perception of smart tourism exposed online to identify the current point of smart tourism in Korea and present the research direction for conceptualizing smart tourism suitable for the domestic situation. Research design, data, and methodology: This study analyzes the perception of smart tourism exposed online based on 20,198 news data from portal sites over the past six years. Data on words used with smart tourism were collected from the leading portal sites Naver, Daum, and Google. Text mining techniques were applied to identify the social awareness status of smart tourism. Network analysis was used to visualize the results between words related to smart tourism, and CONCOR analysis was conducted to derive clusters formed by words having similarity. Results: As a result of keyword analysis, the frequency of words related to the development and construction of smart tourism areas was high. The analysis of the centrality of the connection between words showed that the frequency of keywords was similar, and that the words “smartphones” and “China” had relatively high connection centrality. The results of network analysis and CONCOR indicated that words were formed into eight groups including related technologies, promotion, globalization, service introduction, innovation, regional society, activation, and utilization guide. The overall results of data analysis showed that the development of smart tourism cities was a noticeable issue. Conclusions: This study is meaningful in that it clearly reflects the differences in the perception of smart tourism between online and research trends despite various efforts to develop smart tourism in Korea. In addition, this study highlights the need to understand smart tourism concepts and enhance academic discussions. It is expected that such academic discussions will contribute to improving the competitiveness of smart tourism research in Korea.