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1. Introduction and scope
Using ICT in tourism industry has a long history but only since 2000, we notice the transformative effect of ICT to core operations of the industry, through the automation of many tasks, such as e-tickets and on-line hotel booking (Law et al., 2014). The term e-tourism was introduced as “the digitization of procedures in the tourism sector” (Buhalis and Foerste, 2015) and empowered the distribution and marketing of touristic products. Along with the technological revolution, based on the expansion of the internet and the social media, digitization (Chuang et al., 2017) has changed the market conditions for tourism organizations (Ashari et al., 2014).
Big data and artificial intelligence (AI) (from now on BDAI) are identified as disruptive factors in the current era, and we try to discover their value and impact, as such, to the tourism industry. Our approach attempts to bridge the sector’s strategies with BDAI implementations, underlying opportunities and challenges through a systematic literature review methodology. Besides identifying the theoretical and practical benefits that BDAI brings in the tourism sector, we had another major objective of practical implications. Our purpose was to formulate a first step toward a renewable guidebook for practitioners that introduces BDAI and need to overcome relevant challenges from both, business and technological perspective. The current BDAI literature has not been profoundly and systematically explored, despite its important implication for managers, academicians and consumers alike. This is the first systematic review in the area and contributes to the field of using BDAI in e-commerce marketing, retailing and e-tourism research.
In this paper, we discuss the ICT impact and business value focusing on the application of big data technologies and AI in tourism. In Section 2, we introduce the reader to the data-driven tourism sector. Section 3 presents the methodology we followed for our research while Section 4 and Section 5 presents the results of the systematic literature review. Finally, Section 6 discuss the findings, summarize the main conclusions and indicate some directions for future work.
2. Tourism in the data age
2.1 Business value of data technologies in tourism
Computing power becomes increasingly available to smaller businesses through the cloud computing paradigm democratizing access to platforms, infrastructures and software. Small family hotels, for...