Smart tourism: a scientometric review (2008-2020)

Abstract

The fast path of smart tourism developments within the tourism and hospitality field clarifies the need to identify its intellectual structures and monitor its evolution. 43% of the articles ever published are from the last two years. An initial work, covering the papers published between 2008 and 2018, reveal five dimensions under a humanware approach: (i) smart technologies; (ii) smart ecosystems; (iii) value creation; (iv) tourism experience; and, (v) sharing economy. With this classification framework, the present work aims to identify emerging trends and future research paths using a scientometric analysis of smart tourism research from 2008 to 2020. The scientometric analysis was conducted over the 1321 papers referenced and retrieved from Web of Science and Google Scholar, narrowed to the 225 classified as tourism and hospitality. These articles were subject to content, citation and authorship analysis. The content analysis produced eight clusters that represent the main research streams. This result confirms the field's fast evolution path since two of these clusters emerged in the last three years. The twenty most cited articles were reviewed and classified under the humanware framework. The vast majority of the works are still related to smart ecosystems and technologies, unveiling the need to enrich knowledge related to the other streams and the tourism and hospitality response to Covid-19 supported by smart technologies.

Tourism and COVID-19: The Show Must Go On

“…To Sigala [14], Tourism 4.0 can be referred to as a new ecosystem of tourist value, built on a paradigm of highly technology-based service production and supported by the common principles of Industry 4.0. This ecosystem relies on several components, such as interoperability, virtualization, decentralization, real-time data collection and analysis capability, service guidance, and modularity [40], where technology is used to improve tourist-firm interactions and experiences [41,42].…”

“…Various new technologies have also been applied in tourism, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, location-based services or virtual systems, and augmented reality [40,42]. Several new technologies to support Tourism 4.0 already exist, such as autonomous agents and things (e.g., intelligent voice assistants or autonomous cars) [43] and anthropomorphic service robots [38,44].…”

“…Since the introduction of the Internet to the business arena, information technology (IT) has been an important facilitator, catalyst, and-in some cases-disruptor for travel and tourism [42,45,46]. Many studies have been conducted in the tourism and hospitality field related to travel sentiment analysis [35].…”

“…Since the introduction of the Internet to the business arena, information technology (IT) has been an important facilitator, catalyst, and-in some cases-disruptor for travel and tourism [42,45,46]. This is particularly true in today's world, as IT has been introduced into all travel and tourism processes, every interested party in tourism, and every subdomain of the industry [42,[45][46][47].…”

Constructing a smart destination framework: A destination marketing organization perspective

“…Despite growing attention, studies examining the practical application of smart destination concepts differ substantially in their scope and focus (Baggio et al, 2020;Boes et al, 2016;Buhalis & Amaranggana, 2013;Ivars-Baidal et al, 2019;Ivars-Baidal et al, 2021;Sigalat-Signes et al, 2020). Conceptions of smart destinations vary from one place to another depending on the diverse visions of the interested stakeholders (Borges-Tiago et al, 2022). Researchers have emphasized various aspects of smart destinations 3 including the livability of communities (Harrell et al, 2014), sustainability efforts (Gonzalez-Reverte, 2019;Shafiee et al, 2019), the role of entrepreneurs (Williams et al, 2020), and the importance of self-service technologies on smart destinations (Jeong & Shin, 2020).…”