The Past, Present, and Future of Smart Tourism Destinations: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Despite the emergence of the notion of smart tourism destinations in tourism research, few studies have delved deeply into the topic, and the little research focusing on the subject has not offered an overview of its evolution, current scope, and potential domains of interest. This study aims to fill this gap in literature by applying a bibliometric approach. The current research offers a comprehensive review of 258 investigations published between 2013 and 2019 in outlets indexed by the ISI Web of Science database and other relevant publications on information technology related to hospitality and tourism. The findings indicate the domains of tourism, journals, and themes that merit consideration in smart tourism destination future research and serve both professionals and academics as a guide for future lines to explore.

Infrastructure Elements for Smart Campuses: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…They are forming 48.4% of the total sample size. The key articles from China are Wang [23]; Bastidas-Manzano [24]; Rochat [25]; and Thangaraj [26] that featured localised and regional studies on the construction of smart campuses using big data architecture, cloud computing, learning analytics and teaching systems. Other dominant studies emerged from the United States of America, Taiwan, Italy, Brazil, and Canada with 34, 27, 23, 18 and 14 publications respectively.…”

“…Modularity 0-Auto-analysers (Sources:[1,14,23,24,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]). Modularity 2-Cloud computing (Sources:[5,7,[9][10][11]30,31,37,39,[61][62][63][64][65][66]).…”

Conceptualizing the Smart Tourism Mindset: Fostering Utopian Thinking in Smart Tourism Development

“…Smart tourism refers to initiatives and approaches, usually at the destination level, that aim at harnessing the unique capabilities of smart technologies to achieve specific development goals (Gretzel, 2021). These goals span from efficiency and competitiveness goals for businesses within the smart tourism ecosystem (Gretzel, Werthner, Koo, & Lamsfus, 2015) and for destinations overall (Bastidas-Manzano, Sánchez-Fernández, & Casado-Aranda, 2021;Jovicic, 2019), to broader environmental, economic, and social sustainability goals. Cavalheiro, Joia, and Cavalheiro (2020) depict the ultimate aim of smart tourism development as being public value creation.…”

“…From a research perspective, smart tourism constitutes a rich, inter-disciplinary field of inquiry that is growing tremendously (Bastidas-Manzano et al, 2021;Mehraliyev, Chan, Choi, Koseoglu, & Law, 2020;Ye, Ye, & Law, 2020), but misconceptualizations of smart tourism remain common in the scientific literature (Shafiee, Rajabzadeh Ghatari, Hasanzadeh, & Jahanyan, 2019), with technological applications remaining at the forefront of much of the research (e.g., Jeong & Shin, 2020;Shen, Sotiriadis, & Zhang, 2020;Um & Chung, 2021). In general, smart tourism research lags smart city research, which already has a strong governance focus (Yigitcanlar et al, 2018) and a more critical stance toward smart development theory and practice (Wiig, 2016;Yigitcanlar & Lee, 2014).…”

Intersection of Data Science and Smart Destinations: A Systematic Review

“…This scientific literature review provides an in-depth examination of the intersection between data science and smart destinations, focusing on previous bibliometric studies and systematic literature reviews on tourism and smart destinations (Haobin Ye et al, 2020;Mehraliyev et al, 2020;Bastidas-Manzano et al, 2021;Lee et al, 2021). It also includes references to the evolution of information and communication technology (ICT) and tourism (Buhalis and Law, 2008;Law et al, 2014).…”