A highly competitive environment with increased demand for personalized services drives the tourism and hospitality industry to embrace immersive and intelligent technologies. Smart technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) assist in promotions, marketing brands, customer analysis, and ultimately leading to sustainable businesses. Marketing research is an inevitable element for any businesses that helps in understanding their customers, catering their needs, and turning them into loyal customers. Marketing strategies incorporated with smart technologies are gaining high importance in the tourism and hospitality industries due to three major outcomes such as experience enhancement, revenue improvement and effective operations. Artificial intelligence revamped the hospitality industry with customized services and tailored recommendations based on a wholesome of customer data. Virtual reality technology provides high immersive experience to boost tourism, to enhance customer experience, to influence positive travel decisions.
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Smart technologies are gradually transforming everything around us on a global perspective leading to a tech-friendly future. Gen Y and Gen Z are quite adaptive and welcoming towards smart technologies due to its availability at one’s touch point. Various industries, organizations, companies have added smart technologies into their operations to obtain sustainable benefits on a long run. Incorporation of smart technologies in many industries bestows energy cost reduction and builds stronger brand image. In line with that, tourism and hospitality industry who are at the vanguard of adopting smart technologies have pivoted many of their business practices to enhance guest experiences, mitigate risks, market products and increase revenue. Smart technologies afford a range of services such as smart room controls, smart parking, smart booking, virtual tours, energy management, virtual reality marketing, Virtual reality stimulated training in the hospitality and tourism industry (Flame Analytics, 2023).
Information and Technology (ICT) has improvised the marketing research in various field leading to digital marketing. Digital Marketing is a technology-enabled one in which service providers collaborates with customers, partners to enable a sustainable value to all stakeholders (Kannan & Li, 2017). A good number of studies have been recorded on analysing the influence of technologies such as internet, social network on market research (Brady et al., 2008; Kannan & Li; 2017). The digital marketing gives space to e-commerce era which is one of the most successful applications of digital marketing. E-commerce/ E-retail (i.e.) online buying and selling (Dennis et al., 2004) started to rule to the world in the Asian and Eastern European markets (Neilsen 2017) while their growth faces downfall in the North American and Western European markets (Statista, 2017a). With the progressing side of digital marketing, advanced immersive technologies (Extended Reality) started to integrate in the marketing world giving rise to V-commerce (virtual commerce) (Nguyen et a., 2016). Extended Reality(XR) which is an umbrella term of virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality started to leverage the marketing aspects of global industries.
Several studies have predicted that these extended realities will have a greater impact on many dimensions of lives (Slater and Sanchez-Vives, 2016). For example, analysing customer needs, behaviour pattern, priority, will be hugely affected by these extended reality technologies. Incorporation of Artificial Intelligence and Extended Realities in businesses will interpret the customer activities, behavior, and their preferences towards a product (Grewal et al., 2017; Bailenson, 2008; Brohm et al., 2007).