Live streaming in tourism and hospitality: a literature review

ABSTRACT

Live streaming, a reciprocal communication technology allowing real-time interactions, is widely embraced by tourists and tourism business operators. Mirroring its prosperity in practice, research about live streaming in tourism and hospitality sprang up since the pandemic. This paper is the first attempt to systematically review live streaming and categorize prior accumulated knowledge, revealing research gaps and providing future research agenda. This review discovered an upward trend of live streaming-related publications since 2019. Findings also unveil a notable imbalance between the research of tourists and business operators. Moreover, existing studies lack diversification in research contexts as well as in theoretical foundation.

KEYWORDS:

• Live stream
• live broadcast
• live streaming travel
• real-time interaction
• virtual travel
• consumers

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly supported by a research grant funded by the University of Macau.