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1. Introduction
Due to the impact of COVID-19 and policy requirements since 2020, consumers cut down most travel and tourism activities (Hao et al., 2020). This variation has not only directly affected the survival and development of the hospitality industry, but also brought a serious blow to the world economy. As we all know, the hospitality is vulnerable to sudden disasters, like pandemics, terrorist attacks and natural disasters (Chen et al., 2021a, 2021b). Hotel managers need to take corresponding measures to meet the various challenges in different crisis. Due to the new demand of the new normal, contactless, hygiene and cleanliness are the key to the effective prevention of COVID-19 (Pillai et al., 2021). Using intelligent means instead of human labor in hotels, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, noncontact payment and intelligent sensing equipment, can protect hotel consumers and front-line service personnel (Hao et al., 2020), especially under circumstances of high contact.
In the Internet era, digital technology including information technology (IT) and information communication technology has been widely applied in the hospitality and tourism. On the basis of the disruptive technologies, digital transformation happened when the organizational structure and business model have changed because of the use of digital technologies. Under the influence of COVID-19, more consumers prefer intelligent hotels than human hotels (Kim et al., 2021). Thus the digital transformation of hospitality is imminent, which is very important in future studies.
In recent years, digital transformation has become a topic of great importance to researchers. Although the literature of digital transformation is increasing, there are still some knowledge gaps in the existing review research. Existing reviews mainly focus on the development of digital technology in hotels and travel. For example, Tussyadiah (2020) reviewed AI, robotics and Internet of Things (IoT). Shin (2022) reviewed robot research in business management from a service ecosystem perspective, but they did not emphasize the transformation. Moreover, some scholars focused on smart tourism and smart hotels. Mehraliyev et al. (2020) summarized the latest progress of smart tourism; Law et al. (2021) put the smart hotel research into attention. Existing literature discusses smart hotels and tourism from the perspective of suppliers and consumers, but does not focus on the process to digitalization....