Tourism is a vital sector in the economy of many countries. It is important to bear in mind that this activity is highly oriented towards consumer satisfaction and is also subject to a high degree of uncertainty. This means that there is a great need for information and business intelligence in order to produce long-lasting, sustainable competitive advantages, which can be achieved with smart business management in which big data and artificial intelligence play a key role. In this bibliometric study on the use of these technologies in the tourism industry, the authors analyze the evolution of these concepts within the sector. By analyzing the literature, we can follow the transformation of tourism management, study how these technologies have become progressively more defined and consolidated, and lastly, provide guidelines for future lines of research on this subject.
TopIntroduction
It is common knowledge that uncertainty is an element that all of the economic agents in our society and our markets have in common across all sectors. For this reason, any technology, method or innovation that economic agents can find and use to reduce this uncertainty is highly appreciated.
Information and data, and the intelligence that is extracted from them, have become enormously valuable in the present day. Several years ago, they might not have been significantly valuable due to the small amount of data and information available to companies, or because the use of the technology that was available at that time did not yield conclusions that could lead to decision-making and firm and secure actions, as is the case today.
Big Data technology “allows its users to use and process massive amounts of data obtained from the macro-environment of the different agents to facilitate decision-making and process automation” (Gartner, 2021, p. 1).
Process automation has made Artificial Intelligence (referred to here as AI) possible. AI consists of “the ability of machines to use algorithms, learn from data, and use what they learn in decision-making, just as a human would” (Rouhiainen, 2018, pp. 3-4).
Since tourism is a sector that is highly oriented towards consumer satisfaction, in addition to presenting a high level of uncertainty, there is a great need for information and business intelligence to create competitive advantages that Big Data can satisfy, and we believe that the study of its applications in the tourism sector is well-merited.
This study is organized according to the following sections:
- 1.
Background. Literature review. This section presents an analysis of the contents of the publications we are working with, extracting key information from those best suited to our research.
- 2.
Main focus of the chapter. Materials and bibliometric methods. We analyze the materials and methods used in our bibliometric study in order to better interpret the obtained results. Bibliometric results. We present and interpret the numerical-graphical results on the subject of our study generated by the software and associated tools.
- 3.
Solutions and recommendations. Discussion and conclusions. We cover the most relevant aspects of the results from the previous sections and how the use of Big Data and AI affect economic agents in the tourism sector.
TopBig Data And Ai In The Tourism Sector
The traditional tourism sector can be understood as a sector in which users had a limited range of action and planning. In other words, the sources of information and tools that consumers consulted were based on the concept of “word-of-mouth,” as users consulted acquaintances, brochures and printed journals or went directly to travel agencies, airports and other transportation stations to plan their tourism experiences (Colladon et al., 2019).
This resulted in processes that today would be considered ineffectual and inefficient and that did not allow economic agents such as companies to obtain such vast quantities of data as they currently handle, resulting in tourism offerings that were quite standardized and provided much less added value to users than what we enjoy today (Vecchio et al., 2018).
However, it is true that there are no publications that cover traditional tourism in the period that was studied, since, as mentioned above, the use of information technologies, not to mention the use of Big Data and AI, was very limited for two main reasons: the scarcity of data and technological limitations.