Progress on information and communication technologies in hospitality and tourism

1. Introduction

The development of information and communication technology (ICT) in general, and e-business in particular, presents unprecedented challenges and opportunities for tourism and hospitality businesses. The rapid deployment of the Internet and the Web 1.0, as well as the Web 2.0/social media environment, has effectively revolutionized the hospitality and tourism industries (Buhalis, 2003). Increasing demand from sophisticated consumers, coupled with the growing need for enhancing efficiency and improving customer satisfaction, has led tourism and hospitality managers to become gradually more reliant on ICT to assist in completing job tasks. More importantly, these developments have revolutionized operational and strategic management, bringing a wide business process re-engineering throughout the industry.

Keeping pace with the increasing number of applications, hospitality and tourism journals have regularly published the overall progression of ICT- or information technology (IT)-related papers. For instance, Leung and Law (2007) review IT papers published from 1985 to 2004 in three leading tourism journals, Law et al. (2009) examine IT papers published from 2005 to 2007 in 57 hospitality and tourism journals and Law et al. (2013) analyze IT papers published in the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly between 1960 and 2011. Most recently, Ip et al. (2011) review ICT papers published from 1999 to 2008 in eight hospitality journals. Despite the significant contributions of these previous works, there exists a gap in the existing literature on reviewing ICT papers that are published since 2009 in hospitality and tourism journals.

To determine how far researchers have recently progressed since 2009 in the areas which need to be explored, this paper presents a review and critical analysis of ICT-related papers published in hospitality and tourism journals between 2009 and 2013. It sets out to provide a comprehensive overview of the applications of ICT in tourism and hospitality from the perspectives of both consumer and supplier. To achieve this, the paper first addresses the topic from the consumer viewpoint by looking at their role in the five stages of Engel et al.’s (1990) consumer decision-making process, namely:

• need recognition;

• information search;

• evaluation of alternatives;

• purchase decision; and

• post-purchase behavior.

The paper then goes on to examine the use of ICT by hospitality and tourism suppliers along the seven dimensions presented by Ip et al. (2011) (strategic and operational...