Artificial intelligence in hospitality and tourism. State of the art and future research avenues

ABSTRACT

The hospitality and tourism industry has recently undergone a profound transformation driven by information and communication technologies developments thanks to innovations in Artificial Intelligence and its tools. However, although the literature on AI and tourism is growing, scientific research on these themes is still fuzzy and fragmented. This article aims to explore the current state of the art and possible future developments of AI and its tools in tourism. The study develops a bibliometric analysis using the ISI database and applies social network analysis to map its intellectual structure. Then, the study develops a qualitative literature review to investigate the main research themes and propose future research avenues. The findings identify some main research strands such as: Big Data for demand forecasting and customer satisfaction; Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality for co-creation processes; the COVID-19 pandemic, social distances issues and service robots; and the smart tourism trends.

KEYWORDS:

• Artificial intelligence
• hospitality and tourism industry
• social network analysis
• literature review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The selected keywords are: ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘big data’, ‘data mining’, ‘machine learning’, ‘deep learning’, ‘neural network’, ‘robot’ and ‘accommodation’, ‘destination’, ‘holiday’, ‘hospitality’, ‘hotel’, ‘journey’, ‘tourism’, ‘travel’, ‘vacation’, ‘visit’. All in single and plural forms. See for instance other work that use similar keywords (Lv, Shi, and Gursoy 2021; Lazzeretti et al. 2022, etc.).

2 The co-occurrence analysis developed in Section 4.3 identifies some major sub-networks that partially confirm the qualitative literature review, but it is not coincident. We believe that the two analyzes cannot and should not necessarily coincide in their results. In fact, the quantitative analysis lays the groundwork for the identification of the 4 topics on which the qualitative review is based.

3 For instance Virtual bots that turn customer service into self-service.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by CHANGES, PNRR, Mission 4, PE5, NextGenEU (CUP B53C22004010006).