Information communications technology (ICT)-driven tourism innovations can be realized by a systematic integration of tourism and IT infrastructures (Koo et al., 2017a, b). A strong wave of smart digital technologies and the development of urbanization with the smart city concept have strongly influenced the research trends and agendas of the tourism and hospitality industry (Gretzel and Koo, 2021). In the past few years, new research on technology-driven tourism, such as smart tourism, has received great attention from researchers. Smart tourism is “a new buzzword applied to describe the increasing reliance of tourism destinations, their industries and their tourists on emerging forms of ICT that allow for massive amounts of data to be transformed into value propositions” (Gretzel et al., 2015a, b, c).
Smart tourism development accelerates different types and levels of convergence and innovation in various ICTs and tourism contexts (Koo et al., 2017a, b). For instance, smart tourism applications such as location-based destination services draw significant attention from the tourism and hospitality industry to maximize mutual benefits between individual visitors and destinations (Gretzel et al., 2015a, b, c; Li et al., 2019). Convergence and synergies between (1) touristic spaces and urban infrastructure, (2) residential life and tourism experiences, (3) physical objects and virtual spheres, (4) work and leisure, (5) tourism providers and consumers, and (6) urban planning and destination management in a variety of contexts accelerate the adoption of new technology and development for the tourism and hospitality industry (Getzel and Koo, 2021).
Today, new information technologies (ITs) have brought about big disruptions and have fundamentally changed the tourism and hospitality businesses (Chang et al., 2018). Travelers who are equipped with new technologies and smart devices search for urban spaces and tourist sites, share travel experiences and post online review comments with detailed information about tourism products and services, leisure activities and travel preferences at touristic sites anywhere, anytime (Kim et al., 2017, 2019). New technologies in tourism provide real-time recommendations before decisions are made for suggested travel options. Thus, more tourism and hospitality businesses and consumers alike use new data, technologies and devices to achieve their purposes; businesses can formulate new strategies and operate diverse technologies to compete, expand and sustain their markets. New technologies, including smartphones and sensing devices, facilitate bidirectional ways for travelers to heighten connectivity at touristic sites.
Overall, new technologies for the tourism and hospitality industry are not only making competitive advantages for themselves but are also bringing about new business opportunities and building consumer trust through social media and other social network platforms (Dinhopl and Gretzel, 2016). In addition, the latest ICTs, including AI (artificial intelligence), robotics, VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), IoT (Internet of Things) and 5G communication technology, are expanding the economies of scope and scale in the tourism and hospitality industry. In addition, these new technologies encourage vertical travelers to search for unusual experiences and seek out authentic experiences. New technologies offer a higher concentration of identity-creating and share-worthy experiences, which have significant impact on travelers' behaviors (Gretzel and Koo, 2021). In addition, global technological platforms like Airbnb, Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor and Uber enable local suppliers to foreign visitors and bring them to certain destinations through global service offerings (e.g. Airbnb and Uber). Global standard services and their offerings raise higher certainty versus unpredictable serendipitous areas.
From the individual perspective, technologies help travelers to better pre-plan their trips in terms of budget, activity cost and itinerary, but at the same time allow enough flexibility to make adjustments if needed. For example, a mobile phone allows travelers to make impulse decisions at a local destination through location-based and context-aware services (Kim et al., 2019; Koo et al., 2016). Although data-driven information can enrich travel experiences, it entails several challenges as well as opportunities, including bridging the digital and physical spheres, integrating sensors and smartphones as core technologies, gathering big and open data as the lifeblood of smart tourism, technology-mediated co-creation, ecosystem structures for tourism and public-private-consumer collaboration in data/information exchanges.
The interdependence between new technologies and tourism services has transformed economic, social and cultural aspects of the tourism sphere (e.g. transportation and telecommunication data) that utilize infrastructure in urban cities to global and local applications in the smart tourism ecosystem (Gretzel et al., 2015c). As a result, we suggest that new research on technology-enabled tourist values have drawn attention not only from tourism and hospitality scholars but also from interdisciplinary scholars. To provide a lens for understanding the trends and issues that are related to new technologies, Industrial Management and Data Systems presents a special issue that comprises fifteen articles. Each paper contributes in important ways to this notion of the new technologies in the tourism and hospitality industry by focusing on diverse applications and systems that highlight new trends and businesses and by contributing important theoretical and practical implications to smart tourism development.
We have received numbers in the double-digits of papers from various countries including China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Korea, Macao, Malaysia, Portugal, Spain, Taiwan and United States for publication consideration in this special issue. The number of submissions reflects the increasing attention paid to new technologies in the tourism and hospitality industry. After a rigorous peer review process, 14 full-length papers were selected and are included in this special issue. These papers cover a wide range of topics from authors in different countries and regions.
The first article, co-authored by Joseck Nyaboro, Kwangsoo Park and Jaehyun Park, is “M-Tour: A new socio-technological design application for destination competitiveness in Egypt,” which explores how comparative tourism destinations could incorporate the merits of competitive tourism destinations by implementing a sociotechnical design application for smart tourism. It reveals that Egypt has diverse comparative advantages in terms of touristic features; however, the dysfunctional flow of information in the tourism industry synthesized “M-Tour” as a new sociotechnical design application (Nyaboro et al., 2021).
The second article, co-authored by Yeongbae Choe and Daniel R. Fesenmaier, is “Designing an advanced system for destination management: A case study of Northern Indiana,” which describes the core of an advanced destination management system that uses a series of data-matching techniques and business analytics. The authors applied demographic factors (e.g. gender, age and income), search interests, referred websites, the number of total sessions on websites, temporal aspects and spatial aspects of visitor travel information in Northern Indiana, USA to develop an analytic model (Choe and Fesenmaier, 2021).
The third article, authored by Sungyoung Hlee, is “How reviewer level affects review helpfulness and reviewing behavior across hotel classifications: the case of Seoul in Korea.” It explores the effects of reviewer qualification and credibility and hotel classification on online hotel reviews. It finds that the effect of reviewer level on review helpfulness is not significant, and that a high-level reviewer tends to leave a lower rating and a lengthier review than a low-level reviewer (Hlee, 2021).
The fourth article, co-authored by Miguel Angel Gonzales-Chavez and Natalia Vila-Lopez, is “Designing the best avatar to reach millennials: gender differences in restaurant choice,” which develops a guide for executives or entrepreneurs immersed in the gastronomic field in Peru, to enable them to make appropriate decisions regarding the definition of an attractive and innovative web page design with innovative commercial avatars (Gonzales-Chávez and Vila-Lopez, 2021).
The fifth article, co-authored by Ching-Hung Lee, Qiye Li, and Chih-Wen Shih, is “Service design for intelligent exhibition guidance service based on dynamic customer experience.” It provides a holistic service design method 3E model, which integrates customer experience journey maps, the theory of inventive problem-solving and service assembly and service replacement mechanisms into three design stages. It provides linkage and action-oriented guidance, from customer pain points, service parameters and innovative principles, to solutions (Lee et al., 2021).
The sixth article, co-authored by Xiang Chen, Yaohui Pan, and Bin Luo, is “Research on power-law distribution of long-trail data and its application to tourism recommendation.” It proposes Sina Weibo check-in data, which provides a collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm combined with power-law distribution and finds the recommendation diversity and calculation efficiency while maintaining high precision and recall of recommendations (Chen et al., 2021).
The seventh article, co-authored by Catarina Antónia Maartins, Maria João Aibéo Carneiro and Osvaldo Rocha Pacheco, is “Key factors for implementation and success of destination management systems. Empirical evidence from European countries,” and it identifies the factors that promote the implementation of destination management systems, which underscore the importance of the diversity of partnerships and governance and functions of destination management organizations (Martins et al., 2021).
The eight article, co-authored by Lina Zhong, Xiaoya Zhang, Hing Kai Chan, Jinyu Xiao and Kaoyu Kong, is “Construction and empirical research on acceptance models? of service robots applied in the hotel industry.” It highlights the key characteristics of hotel robot acceptance. This paper discusses how hotel service robots can evolve and how they can influence the tourism industry's major technology issues (Zhong et al., 2021).
The ninth article, co-authored by Chun-Min Kuo, Wen-Yuan Chen, Chin-Yao Tseng and Chang Ting Kao, is “Developing a smart system with Industry 4.0 for customer dissatisfaction,” develops a smart system based on the concept of Industry 4.0, which enables hoteliers to interact with customers by understanding what they/like/dislike from their behaviors via dissatisfaction identification system (DIS) data analysis. They found that 36 out of 127 service items are identified as service issues for participating hotels (Kuo et al., 2021).
The tenth article, co-authored by Seobgyu Song, Seunghyun “Brian” Park and Kwangsoo Park, is “Thematic analysis of destination images for social media engagement marketing,” and it assesses the effect of photo themes to facilitate social media user engagement on Facebook brand pages and emphasizes the important role of designing images for developing destination marketing strategies. The authors found that photographs on the social media sites of three tourism destinations presented methodological insight by integrating thematic and statistical analysis with social media analytics (Song et al., 2021).
The eleventh article, co-authored by Irene Cheng Chu Chan, Jing Ma, Rob Law, Dimitrios Buhalis and Richard Hatter, is “Dynamics of hotel website browsing activity: The power of informatics and data analytics,” which investigates the temporal dynamics of users' browsing activity on a hotel website. The authors analyzed a total of 29,976 hourly weblog files from a luxury hotel in Hong Kong and found that users' browsing behaviors on the hotel website differ on a yearly, monthly, daily and weekly basis; therefore, strategic and operational management and marketing decision-making should be applied differently (Chen et al., 2021).
The twelfth article, co-authored by Chiara Giachino, Luigi Bollani, Alessandro Bonadonna and Marco Bertetti, is “Reinforcement learning for content's customization: a first step of experimentation in Skyscanner,” which tests the potential benefits of applying reinforcement learning to optimize the content of a company's mobile application to best help travelers find their ideal flights. The authors found that simulation of reinforcement learning provides potential benefits for travelers (Giachino et al., 2021).
The thirteenth article, co-authored by Yan Chen, Tianwei Tang, Yongjian Li and Di Fan, “Does interest alignment between hotels and online travel agencies intensify review manipulations,” examines whether a higher interest alignment between online travel agencies (hosting platforms) and hotels (business owners) intensifies review manipulation activities. The authors found that the rating of an agency's partner hotels was abnormally higher than those of matched non-partner hotels (Chen et al., 2021).
The final article, co-authored by Jing Wen Jia, Namho Chung and Jooyoung Hwang, is “Assessing Hotel Service Robot Interaction on Tourists' Behaviour: The Role of Anthropomorphism,” and it investigates the impact of service robots on hotel visitors' behavior and verifies the role of anthropomorphism (human likeness) in customer satisfaction with robots (Jia et al., 2021).
We would like to thank all the authors for their contributions. We wish to express our gratitude especially to Professor Hing Kai Chan and Professor Alain Chong, the Co Editors-in-Chief of IMDS, for supporting the creation of this special issue topic and for providing thoughtful and pertinent advice during all stages of the project. In addition, we would like to give our thanks particularly to the group of international reviewers. The reviewers' time and effort invested in the manuscripts helped improve the quality of all the papers published in this special issue. We also thank the managing editor, Dr. Zhao Cai, for his technical assistance throughout the entire process.
The papers in this special issue address a wide range of topics related to new technologies in the tourism and hospitality industry. Consequently, we believe that our special issue will make a significant theoretical and practical contribution to the academic literature on tourism and to related disciplines. Overall, the research presented in this special issue provides convincing evidence for the value of new technologies and suggests a significant impact of technology development and adoption on the future of the tourism discipline.
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2019S1A3A2098438).
