This study aims to map the intellectual and thematic landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) in smart tourism and hospitality. It identifies influential works, key research domains and emerging trends to provide a comprehensive understanding of how AI has transformed scholarly attention and industry practice in this field.
A bibliometric approach was adopted. Data were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and included English-language journal articles published up to 2024 (N = 719). Descriptive, co-citation and co-word analyses were performed using VOSviewer, while thematic and trend-topic mapping were generated with Biblioshiny to visualize the field's conceptual and temporal evolution.
The study identifies three major intellectual domains and five thematic clusters, with AI, smart tourism and hospitality as core themes. It reveals new insights into AI's integration with sustainability and governance, reshaping the understanding of its role in tourism management.
The study provides valuable insights for industry practitioners and policymakers to implement AI responsibly in tourism and hospitality operations. The findings support the development of transparent, user-centric and data-driven applications that promote sustainable destination management, improve forecasting accuracy and enhance personalized visitor experiences.
This study offers one of the most comprehensive bibliometric mappings of AI in smart tourism to date, combining co-citation and co-word analyses with thematic and trend-topic visualization. The proposed AISTE framework synthesizes technological, experiential and sustainability governance perspectives into an integrated analytical framework for understanding AI-driven smart tourism.
