Technological advancements are progressively changing tourism value chains. Tourism value chains are transforming into global value ecosystems and for tourism businesses is becoming essential to evolve their business model to ensure a smart, sustainable and inclusive tourism development and the adoption of innovation strategies which place the user, the citizen, or the tourist at the centre of the destination processes and value co-creation. This means not only adopting digital technologies to improve products and services but also changing and enhancing organisational culture, competencies, structure, leadership, operating model to be more agile, adaptable and innovative. Looking at management literature on digital transformation (DT) and DT in tourism sector, it emerges that the role and skills of leaders in guiding and inspiring their organisations to adopt and leverage digital technologies for creating new business models and value propositions, remain under investigated. By drawing on extensive literature on DT, the study briefly examines some key management issues regarding DT in tourism and discusses leadership traits that help organizations successfully navigate their transformation towards the absorption and exploitation of digital technological knowledge. Then, the research suggests some directions for future research.