Mapping tourism and hospitality research on information and communication technology: a bibliometric and scientific approach

Technology and information and communication technology (ICT) have been gaining importance in tourism and hospitality with a booming research interest during the last years and specifically recently due to the disruptions of the COVID-19 crisis. Hence it is useful to structure the existing knowledge in this field to better guide directions for future research. To that end, this study synthesizes the academic literature about ‘technology and ICT’ in tourism and hospitality by carrying out a bibliometric analysis. The study identified 2424 documents, including the words ‘technolog*’ and/or ‘ICT’ combined with ‘touris*’, ‘hospitality’, ‘hotel’, and/or ‘travel’ that were published in the period 1988–2021 and collected from tourism and hospitality journals indexed in the Web of Science (WOS) and SCOPUS databases. The analysis was carried out by using SciMAT software, which offers different bibliometric tools and methods in order to achieve consistent results through a keyword co-occurrence analysis and an evolution map. The findings revealed the major research themes, including technology acceptance model, electronic word-of-mouth, user-generated content, self-services technologies, robotics, smart tourism, virtual reality, and trust in technology. The study concludes by identifying and discussing a future research agenda.