Technology, ICT and tourism: from big data to the big picture

Abstract

The past years have seen an unprecedented growth in the ICT economy that has fundamentally altered business models and consumer cultures. Many of the changes this has implied are specifically relevant for tourism, a sector that perhaps more than any other is exposed to and implicated in digital innovation, consumer-business interrelationships, and platform reliance. Most studies of the digitalization of the tourism economy have focused on either business or consumer outcomes; much less attention has been paid to the implications for the Sustainable Development Goals. It is for this reason that this special issue on technology, ICT and tourism focuses on a diverse range of issues related to ICT sustainability: tourism as an opportunity for “digital detox,” the role of social networks in foodstagramming, virtual reality tours to explore tourist attractions from home, teaching simulations to improve learning about systems, big data analysis to determine prevalence of environmental interest, as well as regulatory demands on platforms to address principles of accountability, responsibility and transparency. The paper draws the preliminary conclusion that technology & ICTs advance SDGs at best in marginal ways, and that significant efforts are needed to make use of its potential for wider desirable outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Information and communication technologies
• digitalization
• Sustainable Development Goals
• tourism

A sprawling ICT economy in the middle of a global crisis

Technology innovations and in particular Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have changed tourism in very fundamental ways. The magnitude of these changes is not only evident in their degree of disruptiveness, upsetting long-established economic models, it is also unprecedented in terms of the speed at which it pushes along a wave of tourism and hospitality innovations that influences consumer cultures, preferences, choices, and identities. The scale of these changes is such that the wider field of digital technologies is now the most researched in tourism studies, with individual papers inviting thousands of citations (e.g. Xiang & Gretzel, 2010). Interest will continue to grow as the evolution of the ICT economy continues. This raises pertinent questions for tourism sustainability. As the UN (2020) affirms, nations have moved further away from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as a result of COVID-19, and it is fundamentally unclear how progress on the goals can be resumed. At the same time, some authors have outlined key roles for ICTs in sustainable development (Sachs et al., 2019).

At the time of writing, in November 2020, international tourism continues to be at a stand-still, with travel warnings and restrictions creating a tourism world in stasis (ICAO, 2020). With vaccinations about to begin and industry expectations that there will be a rebound in traveler interest, it will soon be time to take stock of the pandemic: of bankruptcies, new debt, job loss, grief, trauma. While many of the thousands of articles already published on the consequences of the pandemic are speculative in their conclusions, there are also certainties: As the UN (2020) affirms, COVID-19 has undermined what limited progress on the SDGs had been made prior to the crisis. The global poor have suffered most from the pandemic, including deaths, livelihood disruptions, restrictions in transport affecting food markets, and looming depression (Naidoo & Fisher, 2020). The wealthiest individuals in the world, on the other hand, as well as the world’s large corporations, have profited: Business Insider (2020) suggests that while 40 million US Americans filed for unemployment during the pandemic, billionaires earned an additional net worth of US$637 billion. Among the winners are providers of ICT solutions, such as Zoom’s founder Eric Yuan, who increased his wealth by US$2.5 billion between March and June 2020 alone. Even greater was Amazon CEO’s Jeff Bezos’ rise in wealth, about US$48 billion in the same period of time (ibid.), a sum equivalent to half the GDP of Cuba (in 2019; World Bank, 2020). Table 1 presents an overview of the world’s 20 largest global tech corporations, which are likely to have seen a significant increase in revenue streams during the pandemic.

Table 1. The largest global tech corporations by revenue, 2019.

#	Company	Revenue (US$ billion)	#	Company	Revenue (US$ billion)
1	Amazon	280.5	11	Comcast	109.0
2	Apple	260.2	12	China Mobile	108.0
3	Samsung	197.7	13	Siemens AG	97.0
4	AT&T	181.2	14	Dell Inc.	90.1
5	Foxconn	178.2	15	Deutsche Telekom AG	89.3
6	Alphabet	161.9	16	Hitachi	85.8
7	Microsoft	143.0	17	IBM	77.1
8	Verizon	131.9	18	Panasonic	72.0
9	Huawei Technologies	122.0	19	Intel	71.9
10	Nippon T&T	112.4	20	Facebook	70.7
				Total Revenue	2,641

Source: FXXSI (2020).

More important are the social consequences of the pandemic. There is a much less discussed situation of children and their mothers, who have faced negative outcomes regarding health, nutrition, education, learning, protection, wellbeing, family finances, and poverty (Loperfido & Burgess, 2020; Mahase, 2020). Notably, even where forms of physical, emotional abuse and neglect are short-lived, their effects can be felt for a lifetime and lead to mental disorders, drug use, or suicide attempts (Norman et al., 2012). There is a related issue of isolation and loneliness that affects mental well-being, as links between social isolation and poor physical (cardiovascular) and mental health are well established (Leigh-Hunt et al., 2017). COVID-19 has been linked to changes in stress and depressive symptoms, as a result of feelings of loneliness (Novotny et al., 2020). Disasters also lead to posttraumatic stress and trauma over bereavement (Valtorta et al., 2016). After long periods of lock-down, many citizens in wealthy economies will yearn for a return to normal. The annual holiday will be a very important element in this.

Most ambiguous are environmental outcomes of the pandemic. In many parts of the world, air quality has improved significantly, as industries have shut down and transport demand declined (Corlett et al., 2020). Impacts on protected areas varied: While some have seen reduced human pressure as a result of COVID-related restrictions in visitation that have benefited animals (Corlett et al., 2020; Manenti et al., 2020), others have faced subsequent overcrowding when temporary visitation restrictions were lifted, including problems related to parking and pressure on vegetation, as well as unauthorized activities such as camping or fires (McGinlay et al., 2020). There have also been negative effects of protected area closures in less developed economies related to poaching and the interruption of wildlife conservation management practices (Manenti et al., 2020; Naidoo & Fisher, 2020). The global climate system clearly profited from the pandemic, as transport restrictions and the downsizing of production reduced greenhouse gas emissions. CO₂ emissions are expected to have contracted by 4% to 7% in 2020 compared to 2019 (Le Quéré et al. 2020). While this is to be welcomed from a mitigation point of view, it is also illustrative of the challenge to limit global warming to a maximum of 1.5 °C, for which it would be necessary to achieve equally significant emission reductions year-on-year (IPCC, 2018). Tourism, with its underlying condition of movement, is a major factor in generating transport demand, and any return to pre-COVID travel patterns will make it more difficult to stay on a decarbonization trajectory.

Linking the ICT economy, pandemics, and risks

How are these outcomes of the pandemic related to this special issue? First, the pandemic is a reminder of interrelated social, economic and environmental developments that have created dependencies, vulnerabilities, and risks. The ICT economy has increased economic vulnerabilities because of its role in competition, the extraction of commissions, concentration of financial flows, and the creation of overcapacities in accommodation and air transport (Gössling, 2017; Gössling & Hall, 2019). ICT innovations have simultaneously reduced society’s ability to address problematic developments, as a result of changes in consumer cultures, online identities, and the undermining of governance structures (Zuboff, 2019). This is illustrated by the example of social media’s role in questioning climate change (Treen et al., 2020) or voter manipulation through disinformation (Bradshaw & Howard, 2018). ICTs are deliberately and strategically used by corporations to advance specific agendas. The willingness of platforms to come to terms with these developments has been more than limited, and regulation is fraught with legal challenges (Fahey et al., 2020). There is thus a need to critically consider technology and ICT developments in tourism contexts, specifically in light of assessments that have highlighted the ICT economy’s benefits and potentials in the context of tourism (Ali & Frew, 2014; Benckendorff et al., 2014; Buning & Lulla, 2020; Gallego & Font, 2020; Giglio et al., 2019; Scott & Frew, 2013; Serrano et al., 2020; Tham & Sigala, 2020; Tussyadiah, 2020).

From a consumer viewpoint, the ICT economy has implied new opportunities, specifically with regard to cost comparisons, the opportunity to identify the “best” accommodation, the “hippest” restaurant, the “most beloved” attraction. Less noted is the fact that platforms have also shaped consumer cultures, because they streamline opinion, tastes, preferences and interests through propositions of desirable social form; encouraging, if not demanding, that users evaluate and judge (Gössling, 2017). To a considerable degree, ICT is about travel communication and self-representation: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have important functions in this regard, as travel generates envy as well as social and network capital (Hajli et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2019). These processes affect personal and social identities, as well as personalites (Gössling & Stavrinidi, 2016; Taylor, 2020), which increasingly co-evolve with technology innovations that support patterns of aspirational consumption of specific destinations or luxury forms of travel (Chen et al., 2020; Liu et al., 2019; Marder et al., 2019).

As consumers reveal information about themselves, ICT innovations have also meant a move towards what Zuboff (2019) calls “instrumentarianism”: a limited number of global corporations now have access to a growing flow of data on the individual, in various dimensions (consumer interests, movement, health, political views, economic status, personality). These “concessions” in the form of data “volunteered” to corporations are rarely discussed, yet they are part of developments that have profound consequences for society, consumers, destinations, and business models. In discussing these interrelationships, Gössling (2021) concludes that there is a need for a more critical engagement with ICT outcomes, including implications for social norms, the evolution of consumer cultures, and identity construction. ICT applications also blur boundaries between consumer and citizen, affecting perspectives on governance, and the respective responsibilities and roles of the individual, businesses, and government. These processes are particularly prominent in tourism, which more than any other economic sector seems to bring together these different dimensions.

Second, ICT is directly involved in managing the COVID pandemic. Artificial intelligence is used to screen, detect, track and predict (Hu et al., 2020; McCall, 2020; Vaishya et al., 2020), and to run surveillance tools for contact-tracing apps (for a debate on surveillance in the context of COVID, see Sweeney, 2020). Here is a link to tourism, where AI can be expected to gain important roles in surveillance (Gössling, 2021). AI has become involved in an increasing number of tasks, so far mostly to replace humans: There already are robot concierges, cloakroom robots, robot chefs, robotic bartenders, and transport robots (Tussyadiah, 2020). AI applications in tourism also include biometric identification, meal planning, or voice-steered information searches, for instance in cruise ship environments (Forbes, 2019). While AI increases efficiency, also through the control of staff (Ruel & Njoku, 2020), it upsets an important element of tourism, i.e. the social exchange of hosts/providers with guests/customers. This is equally relevant in the context of further uses of intelligent automation applications in tourism, such as digital personal assistants, chatbots, autonomous vehicles, customer services, robot receptions, automated porters, virtual guides and virtual hosts (Tussyadiah, 2020).

In automated tourist futures, encounters will be increasingly depersonalized and dehumanized, depriving hospitality of one of its most central functions of social exchange. Potentially, this is also true for guest interactions, though it seems currently unclear how tourists will engage with tourists in more automated futures—or if AI will even gain the importance some authors predict, given the central role of sociality in human biology (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008). Turkle (2011) tested these boundaries in the context of humanoid robots that became available in the 1990s: Tamagotchis, Furbies, AIBOs, My Real Baby. She noted the easiness with which children became attached to robots, considering them somehow “alive” and interpreting their “emotions.” These processes gain complexity with the degree of sophistication of both technology and ICT, and ultimately, may question the very essence of what it means to be human. As novelist Jonathan Franzen so eloquently proposes in his book Purity:

The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks—making things, learnings things, remembering things—that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. (Jonathan Franzen 2015: 523)

ICT and tourism: new complexities

ICTs predict their own complexities and controversies, from “fear of missing out” to the fear of mobile phone loss, digital dead zones, or low battery status, and conditions ranging from anxieties to depressions and low self-esteem to techno-stress. Within this field of issues related to “psychological sustainability,” Floros et al. (2020) investigate how millennials view the prospect of digital-free travel. They find that digital detox (voluntary disconnect) is not necessarily perceived negatively, as long as this happens under the assumption of “disconnect to reconnect.” To be offline by default, however, is associated with negative emotions and concerns. In distinguishing mental and physical “away,” Floros et al. suggest that even though it is easier to reduce online time when on holiday, there remain barriers—all related to performance expectancy, the perceived need to be present online. The article illustrates the addictive character of ICT, and the difficulties in breaking with technology that has become essential for sociality. Results imply that, paradoxically, tourism is a potential arena of disconnect, yet also raises performance expectancy (Gössling & Stavrinidi, 2016; Hajli et al., 2018).

While these findings shed further light on the importance of “being offline” at least temporarily, it is worth to remember how mainstreamed tech & ICT applications have already become in tourism and hospitality businesses. For example, restaurants use technologies comprising smart kitchen furniture, guest WIFI, tablets for Point of Service platforms, phone charging stations, digital displays, table-top devices, or music systems; and ICT for reservations, wait list management, finances, marketing, staff management and education, deliveries, menu design, food waste management, energy management, restaurant websites, inventory management, ordering systems, guest loyalty and reward programs, as well as smartphone payment systems (CB Insight, 2017). Notably, in each of these categories, there exist further applications: Food waste management, for example, may rely on ICT to analyze food waste fractions, to coordinate last-minute sales, to make donations, or to contact food banks. Restaurants can use apps to optimize menus with regard to cost, leftovers, dietary aspects, or greenhouse gas content. Restaurants will also have to control and manage reputation on platforms such as Google, TripAdvisor, and recommendation apps. This suggests that technology and ICT innovations facilitate tasks but increase complexity, raising new customer expectations in the process.

An important aspect related to customer behaviour in restaurants is investigated by Vila, Costa and Ellinger (2020) who focus on the emerging trend of posting photographs of food, i.e. “foodstagramming.” In researching motivations for communicating food experiences, they suggest that eating out may already be more about “gathering, sharing, and socializing” online than offline (ibid: 3). Findings from an organized food tour with foodstagrammers confirm that extraordinary and shared experiences, interest in serious leisure, as well as personal status/social identity seeking are main motivations for foodstagrammers. There are structures to be followed in rituals (“camera eats first”), rules to be obeyed (“food is focus”), and gazes to be optimized (specific perspectives on the food), also involving editing and manipulation before posting. Vila et al. conclude that instagramming is about community—with discussions at the table, perhaps involving guests or chefs, and the subsequent sharing of photographs with followers at-a-distance. Community also arises out of common food interests, social networks and interaction in real and digital networks. In this study of social interactions around food, Vila et al. reconfirm the great importance of sociality for social media use, and its complexity in specific hospitality contexts.

How can insights such as these be used to make tourism more sustainable, and to advance the wider SDGs? Growing interest in food is certainly a positive development. People celebrating and discussing food, such as foodstagrammers, are more likely to be critical of food quality. Vila et al. (2020) affirm, for example, that there is also an online interest in vegan and vegetarian eating, as well as waste food initiatives. These are indicative of movements that can come into existence online, and which have started to mainstream into food services—vegetarian dishes on menus are now a norm, and there is a growing number of exclusively vegetarian or vegan restaurants. Online food communities raise the interest in a diversity of food topics, with potential links to more critical appraisals of food production and diets that are urgently needed (Schlosser, 2012).

Another potentially important contribution of ICT to more sustainable tourism is evaluated by Fennell (2020) who discusses personalized, interactive, real-time tours (PIRTs) that allow tourists to experience specific environments or events from home, based on 360-degree view cameras, webcams, and drones. In a framework comprising 28 sustainability criteria, Fennell compares a traditional ecotour with a PIRT, arriving at mixed results: while the traditional ecotour is more economically beneficial for the destination, there is a clear environmental benefit in staying at home. Socio-culturally, the ecotour has a small margin over the PIRT. Fennell concludes that PIRTs may be used to scale up visitation of attractions and destinations, without increasing environmental pressure. PIRTs are however unlikely to replace ecotours. Indirectly, the study also illustrates the trade-offs in comparing economic, environmental, and social criteria. This is of importance given the dominance of economic, managerial or marketing assessments over evaluations of outcomes for environment and society, and difficulties in reaching consensus on what positive economic outcomes really are (Serafeim, 2020). Fennell’s work also indicates potential conflicts: Will virtual travel increase the interest in travel? As Urry (2002: 255) noted almost two decades ago, “… virtual travel will not in a simple sense substitute for corporeal travel, since intermittent co-presence appears obligatory for many forms of social life.” There remain open questions in the analysis of virtual reality applications for the SDGs in tourism.

Will ICTs then make contributions to raising environmental awareness, or influence consumer choices through sustainability-related reviews? This prospect was originally raised by Budeanu (2013), who suggested that online comparison would make socially and environmentally “better” services more attractive. At the time, she found no evidence for her hypothesis. More recent research (Saura et al., 2018) detects some relevance for “the environment” in online hotel reviews. In this study, this includes positive perceptions of quietness (the absence of noise) or “local” food offers, as well as, on the negative side, the observed lack of solar panels or sustainability policies. The share of guests commenting on such issues is marginal, however, and existing debates have arguably little relevance for the SDGs.

To further engage with this issue, Mariani and Borghi (2020) evaluate a big data sample consisting of more than 5.5 million online reviews of accommodation establishments in major tourism destinations (Barcelona, Paris, New York and others), posted on Booking.com and TripAdvisor between 2003 and 2018. They find that environmental discourse, defined as any presence of words related to the environment, is present, but declining over time; content of what is posted, however, has gained depth over time. This latter aspect is defined as the share of environment-related words in relation to the overall amount of words. Both measures reveal a rather marginal relevance of environmental discourse, as evidenced by a 53.8% presence of any environment-related words in online reviews, and a 0.998% depth rate. Considering trends, Mariani and Borghi conclude that platforms should include attributes of “eco-friendliness” in assessment forms, to boost the importance of the topic.

This, indeed, would likely have very significant percussions for tourism, as sustainability becomes a value proposition. Currently, “green” hotel credentials are still insufficiently relevant for accommodation choices—a chicken or egg problem, given that a distinction of the more sustainable businesses through platform sites is usually impossible (an exception are dedicated sites, such as biohotels.de). This, perhaps, is one of the most significant advances of the SDGs ICT could support if platforms agreed on common measures for sustainability, always presented “greener” contenders at the top of ratings.

Yet another use for ICT is discussed by McGrath et al. (2020), who look into opportunities for sustainability teaching simulations. They report on the outcomes of a simulation illustrating the complexity of tourism development, including the relevance of stakeholder interactions. The overall goal is to support systems thinking. In the simulation, students turn into representatives of Destination Management Organizations that manage green economy and tourism development investment decisions. The simulation is based on causal loops that will lead to different outcomes, depending on the decisions made. Findings suggest that students develop a greater understanding of complexity regarding their decisions, the dimensions of change, and the importance of stakeholders, with the added opportunity for classroom discussions. The simulation also allows students to take on the role of different tourism stakeholders and to learn about potentially conflicting goals and objectives. McGrath et al. conclude that the simulation is a valuable teaching and learning tool.

Given the importance of knowledge to raise awareness, and its underlying importance for social norm generation, options for ICT to support learning in its different forms need to be explored in more detail. The range of dimensions, from active to passing learning, games to online tests, videos to apps, and themes as diverse as veganism (Lawo et al., 2020) to carbon literacy (Howell, 2018) is formidable. As current forms of learning in tourism are problematic, including moral licensing and the diffusion of responsibilities (Gössling, 2018), it is desirable that opportunities are more systematically explored and exploited to advance tourism sustainability goals.

Making the ICT economy work for the SDGs

Findings presented by contributors to this SI all support the notion that technology and ICT make some, though marginal contributions to the SDGs. They allow for improvements (teaching) or support new views (reviews, virtual tours, foodstagramming), but there is no evidence of a systemic transition that in any of its dimensions is unambiguously beneficial to society (Sachs et al., 2019). To more critically assess the foundations of the ICT economy is thus paramount. In this context, Leal et al. (2020) discuss that platforms do collect ratings, reviews or reservations data to identify business trends, to monitor businesses and tourists, and to predict tourist behaviour. The purpose is to increase sales on the basis of personalized recommendations, all in near real time. Even though this has repercussions for businesses (e.g. reputation changes) and tourists (trust in peers and recommendations), Leal et al. observe that platforms do not embrace sustainable tourism design principles of accountability, responsibility and transparency (ATR). To develop ethically aligned platforms, they suggest a redesign of data stream pipelines that are ATR-compliant. Leal et al. argue that such a redesign will hold platforms accountable, and increase trust in business-to-platform, tourist-to-platform and business-to-tourist relationships. It will also allow for compliance monitoring. Indirectly, the paper illustrates how complex ICTs have become. Demand forecast models involve, for example, “artificial neural networks,” “emerging pattern mining,” “deep learning,” as well as “support vector machines.” The functioning of these tools is well outside the understanding of most, creating an economy that is abstract in its underlying structures. There is an analogue to the financial crisis in 2007–2008, caused by “lax monetary policy” (Carmassi et al., 2009: 977), or what more adequately may be described as an economy no longer understood by investors, laypeople and even economists, creating a situation in which ignorance led to a lack of regulation.

Yet, we are regularly urged to embrace the ICT economy. As an example, Tuomi et al. (2020) set out to discuss the labor implications of automation, concluding that while millions of jobs will disappear, new job opportunities will come into existence. However, apart from the example of humans becoming “technical supervisors” of robots, there is not much evidence of what the “new tasks and positions” may be. Automation will make redundant a vast labor force with limited skills, many of whom will be unable to “upskill and reskill” (ibid.). If future versions of the Amazon Go store make staff superfluous as robots refill shelves, while AI registers purchases and facilitates payment, how many “supervisors” will it take to control the technology? The questions should not stop here: How will depersonalized service encounters affect customer satisfaction, as people gain check-out time, but loose in social interaction in depopulated store environments? Who will reap the benefits of associated productivity gains? If forwarded to the consumer, will cheaper food mean that consumers become more wasteful? Will there be further concentration in food retail, taking industrial food production to new extremes? The underlying question here is whether any of this is in society’s interest. Technology and ICT innovations are principally imposed by corporations on society, and for all the opportunities implied in AI, automation and big data, we have to keep focused on the big picture. Technology and ICTs could certainly make significant contributions to sustainability, but this potential remains theoretical. “Hope is not a strategy,” we are reminded by the World Economic Forum (2020).

In concluding this introduction to the SI, there is a strong case for COVID-19—recent history’s most significant disruption of the global tourism system—to serve as a basis for reflection on the role of technology and ICT as drivers of processes that are not necessarily socially desirable. Some lessons can be learned from the role of ICT in the crisis itself: The tourism system has grown as a result of ICT, and it has developed in specific directions, adding risks and increasing vulnerabilities in the process, with an overall outcome of instability: for all its self-victimization, the air transport system is also the vector that has distributed COVID-19 globally, in very short periods of time. There are other, equally pertinent questions. If the current ICT development is not supportive of advancing dimensions of the SDGs, who are the enablers of continued, unregulated growth of the ICT economy? Global corporations have been identified as drivers, for obvious reasons of economic self-interest. The lack of governance is a related dimension that has been highlighted. However, there is also a role for academia with its narrow assessments ignoring complexities, sometimes with advocacy tendencies. Only if we begin to ask more critical questions will there be a chance to unlock different technology & ICT futures.