The relevance of mobile tourism and information technology: an analysis of recent trends and future research directions

ABSTRACT

Although there have been studies concerning information and communication technologies adoption in the tourism industry, the research trends of mobile tourism (m-tourism) are still not very clear due to the short development time and emerging nature of the technologies. To fill this gap, this study reviewed and analyzed articles related to online reviews of tourism and hospitality published in academic journals between 2002 and 2015. Through a keyword-driven search and content analysis, 92 articles are identified as relevant and classified into three topics. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of this promising research direction by presenting the interesting classification methods used by relevant publications and their insights. This paper also discusses significant topical and methodological trends, and contributes to an overall understanding of existing research and its limitations.

KEYWORDS:

• m-tourism
• mobile technology
• location-based services
• applications
• literature review
• smart tourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the The Hong Kong Polytechnic University [Grant Number 1-ZE3K].