Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2024

Group recommender systems (GRSs) support groups of users to find items, e.g., restaurants, that suit, as much as possible, all the group members’ preferences. We consider a GRS scenario where a single member of the group, the organizer, uses the system to find and choose a suitable restaurant for the entire group. We present a novel GRS that helps the organizer to: enter the preferences of all the group members, recall them, and manage incompatible preferences. In the system’s experimental evaluation, we have found that the designed functionality for recalling group members’ preferences and managing incompatible preferences improve the quality of the organizer’s choice.

Destination positioning refers to destinations identifying their most distinct attributes and focusing on these in their marketing activities in order to distinguish themselves from competitors, develop a brand identity and highlight uniqueness. In this paper, we consider 9 European capitals and analyse their visual marketing on Instagram to identify how truly distinct their destinations are being presented online. By comparing between them as well as comparing to the perceived destination image measured from visitor photos on the same platform, we present a methodology for identifying each destinations distinct attributes and measuring how well DMOs are positioning themselves with respect to competing destinations, with recommendations for improving their positioning.

Topic modeling is a popular method in tourism data analysis. Many authors have applied various approaches to summarize the main themes of travel blogs, reviews, video diaries, and similar media. One common shortcoming of these methods is their severe limitation in working with short documents, such as blog readers’ feedback (reactions). In the past few years, a new crop of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has become available for researchers. We investigate LLM capability in extracting the main themes of viewers’ reactions to popular videos of a rural China destination that explores the cultural, technological, and natural heritage of the countryside. We compare the extracted topics and model accuracy with the results of the traditional Latent Dirichlet Allocation approach. Overall, LLM results are more accurate, specific, and better at separating discussion topics.

AI-based technologies are taking the world by storm – rapidly changing the course of many industries from arts to education, healthcare to entertainment, and even areas of life we are yet to discover [1–4]. The application of AI-based technologies is also emerging in travel and tourism industries [5, 6], but remains underexplored as a research area [7–9] when specific and feasible AI applications are considered. This study describes and appraises several emerging AI-based deep learning technologies that are un(der)utilized in tourism fields but promise high utility in the future. Furthermore, potential application areas of these technologies within the context of tourism are detailed. Possible research routes and methodologies to investigate the functionality of AI-based applications are also outlined.

In this paper we examine whether cultural characteristics lead to different emotion expressions whilst watching tourist destination ads via digital media, and thus, ads might be perceived differently depending on the country of origin of the viewer. To test this assumption, participants from two different countries, located on two different continents, Austria/Europe, and Colombia/South America, are exposed to a destination ad. Their faces are recorded and post-processing analysis on the recorded videos using the AFFDEX algorithm, that is capable of inferring emotions based on the facial action coding system (FACS), is conducted. Valence scores are compared among the viewers of the two countries over the time span of the whole commercial, and subpopulation differences of basic emotions (joy, surprise, anger, sadness, disgust, fear, and contempt) are explored using time series clustering along with optimizations for the dynamic time warping (DTW) distance. Screening sequences in this way reveals insight on the emotional reactions of different viewer groups. The findings instruct tourism marketers on how to fit the targeted emotions elicited by tourist destination advertising with various cultural settings.

This study investigates how online users from culturally different audiences authenticate social media influencers (SMIs) and their creative products which promote destination culture, traditions, and heritage. We specifically examined the theme of existential authenticity focusing on an elevated sense of being, self-reflection, personal discovery, and a sense of community. The context of the study was Chinese influencer Li Ziqi and her videos that depict domestic, day-to-day life in rural areas of the Sichuan province of China. The videos indirectly and organically promote tourism by contributing to more developed perceptions of China’s destinations, people, and the country's brand through building positive associations, which potentially can be leveraged by the DMOs in their marketing efforts.

Understanding the varying roles of Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) in shaping the digital ecosystem is needed in the management and governance of tourist destinations. However, the evaluation is intricate, needing extensive resources to analyze data from numerous stakeholders. This research uses the Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) framework, hyperlink network analysis, and webometrics to address the complexities. The study examines DMOs’ roles in Gipuzkoa province, Spain, spotlighting its capital San Sebastian recognized as a Smart Destination. It scrutinizes connections of DMOs’ websites alongside websites of other tourism actors (N = 670) and more than 36,000 websites connected to the destination stakeholders’ network. DMOs have distinct roles in the DBE compared to other tourism sectors, with differences evident among DMO types. DMOs play connecting and mediating roles in destination, strengthening network ties and bridging various stakeholders. The study emphasizes the value of varying DMO connections for attracting website visitors. Future research should explore destinations with diverse tech adoption levels and digital transition strategies, while further categorizing stakeholders in the DBE and identifying various ICT actors and their network ties.

This research provides insight into the current knowledge management position in Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs). We explore what kind of tourism data is utilized in the strategy process and how. The main challenges and issues of big data management are addressed. Destinations and tourism businesses need to have a clearly defined strategy on what kind of value they provide and for whom and understand how this strategy leads to a competitive advantage. Access to data and formulation of knowledge for the strategy process is critical. We interviewed 9 Finnish DMO representatives using semi-structured interviews. We identify that enhanced knowledge management skills, resources and successful stakeholder collaboration are needed to enable business strategies based on data and knowledge. The crucial strategy development process still requires an improved understanding of tourism and destination management research.

AI-powered large language models are shaping a new era of learning. Students use AI chatbots for information search and idea inspiration. However, are students’ questioning skills effective enough to interact with an AI Chatbot? This study explores the interaction between students and ChatGPT on idea generation and identifies whether participants can effectively use AI chatbots to simulate creativity for idea generation. The results indicated that, rather than discussing their idea with AI Chatbot for suggestions and recommendations to enhance the existing ideas, many students ask AI to generate more ideas without providing directions. Participants reflected that ChatGPT provided generic ideas and were unsatisfied with its creativity. They are more positive towards using the question guide, developed using SCAMPER questioning technique combined with a narrative approach by the researcher, compared to ChatGPT because the question guide enables perspective-shifting to generate ideas from a new perspective.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the design thinking approach and illustrate how it may be used to facilitate an online course redesign by providing a specific example. This article builds on the theoretical foundation of the design thinking literature. It reviews the stages of the design thinking process, namely empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The paper also presents an example of design thinking steps being applied to a graduate online hospitality course. The paper used a survey with both qualitative and quantitative questions to understand student experiences in this course, to identify students’ goals and challenges, and to build student personas. This research presents one of the personas developed for the redesigned course and offers an approach to redesigning the class to improve the learning experience for this persona. The approach presented in this paper may be useful to other instructors, program directors, hospitality and tourism training professionals, and instructional designers.

Virtual escape rooms (VER) are online educational games that place learners in the scenario of being locked in a specified environment and require them to collect clues, answer questions, or solve puzzles in exchange for an escape code. This paper documents the process of designing a VER for an online hospitality course using Google Workspace tools (i.e., Google Sites, Slides, and Forms). The paper walks the readers through the VER design process, which includes identifying the purpose of creating a VER, creating a storyline, preparing clues (e.g., puzzles and activities for students to solve), setting up an escape code, and collecting student feedback. This process may be followed by online instructors to create VERs that will meet the needs of their courses. The same process may be applied when developing VERs in other environments (e.g., Microsoft products, mobile apps, or metaverse). Based on the feedback of 21 students who participated in the VER described in this paper, the experience was engaging, fun, enjoyable, and helped them learn and understand the class material. This paper may be useful for hospitality and tourism instructors, industry training professionals, and instructional designers.

Dark tourism experiences visualized in destinations evoke diverse tourist experiences, triggering negative emotions and offering insights into historical events. Embodied cognition reactions prompt distinct expressions, reflections, and artwork creation, which can leverage Virtual Reality in tourism and augment dark experiences for distant tourists. This study examines embodied cognition reactions in virtual dark tourism with 32 participants, investigating their responses to narratives and auditory stimuli while impacting artwork. Results show amplified affective experiences via added auditory stimuli and cognitive experiences influenced by narratives. Post-experience, participants manifest their encounters in artworks, reflecting body-mind links.

The rapid advancement of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, bolstered by cutting-edge hardware, has ushered in a new era that blurs the lines between the physical and virtual realms. As opportunities for immersive information absorption in virtual worlds grow, the tourism industry faces escalating pressure to stay competitive. Although traditional VR mainly engages audio-visual senses, this study examines whether multisensory VR in the pre-travel phase enhances users’ sense of presence and technology acceptance. Employing a mixed-methods, between-subjects design, we conducted an experiment with 103 participants divided into a multisensory VR group and an audio-visual VR group. Our aim was to investigate the impact on the sense of ’being there,’ technology acceptance, and the relationship between increased presence and acceptance. Results from tourism professionals reveal no significant variation in physical presence between the two groups; however, the multisensory VR group showed a notable difference in self-presence. Our findings suggest that the inclusion of multisensory stimuli makes VR more approachable and user-friendly, leading to greater self-presence and technology acceptance.

This paper explores the emerging role of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) in the hospitality industry. BCI technology allows users to control devices with their thoughts, potentially transforming guest experiences. The study investigates how guests perceive BCI-enhanced experiences compared to traditional ones. Drawing from service and human-computer interaction literature, the paper conducts a quasi-field pre-study, where participants interact with a BCI-equipped waitress. Surprisingly, participants perceived the BCI-equipped waitress as superior and warmer, resulting in an improved service experience.The research contributes in two ways: it advances understanding of how people perceive BCI-augmented interactions in hospitality and explores the use of BCIs in addressing service failures, improving efficiency in handling customer complaints. The paper outlines plans for larger-scale field studies and online experiments across different hospitality contexts. This research offers insights into the evolving landscape of human-computer interaction in hospitality, with practical implications for the industry’s future.

The metaverse is currently highlighted as one of the technologies with the greatest potential, particularly in the tourism industry. Despite this fact, most of the research on this topic has been of a conceptual nature. This research aims to contribute to this nascent research field by analyzing how the use of the metaverse for viewing a museum can influence the different dimensions of the customer experience. For this purpose, the degree of technological embodiment of the device, as well as the presence (or not) of other users in the digital environment, will be taken into account. Two focus groups were conducted to explore this matter. The results bring to light the importance of the affective and cognitive states that customers feel when they are in the museum through the metaverse. In addition, participants indicate that they prefer to experience the metaverse museum with other people, noting that this closeness to other users may be greater when embodied technologies are applied. This research contributes empirically to this field of research by trying to delineate how the museum experience should be constructed to offer value through the metaverse.

Tourism is an important economic driver for numerous regions, attracting more than one billion visitors annually. While economically significant, excessive numbers of visitors lead to local overcrowding, which negatively impacts visitors’ experience and safety, and causes environmental harm. This paper proposes a practical approach to empowering destination management organizations (DMOs) to manage tourist flows. We advocate for a rule-based approach that models visitor occupancy based on easily understandable influence factors like weather and date. As a central component, an ontology-guided knowledge graph ensures compatibility with diverse touristic data models and allows seamless integration into existing infrastructures. By digitizing DMOs’ experiential knowledge, we facilitate the implementation of lean and cost-effective visitor guidance. We demonstrate our approach by implementing two applications for two different use cases. The results of our qualitative evaluation reveal the compelling potential for rule-based occupancy modeling approaches serving as a baseline for future visitor management systems.

Cultivating a luxurious ambiance and kindling a bourgeois fantasy of a high-quality lifestyle, glamping has increasingly been viewed a consumption ritual. The purpose of this study is to dig deeper into the composition of ritual scenes in glamping and the symbolic meaning behind them. We obtained 3,176 text reviews and 22,379 photos from Ctrip. Utilizing visual identification and textual mining, this study revealed three categories of ritual scenes in glamping (environmental, activity, and equipment), and four types of ritual symbolism (self-renewal, self-participation, self-presentation, and social connection). The findings highlight that glamping goes beyond simple enjoyment and becomes a way for customers to build social networks and claim a bourgeoisie-lifestyle identity.

As “digital natives”, GenZ is set apart from previous generations in terms of its online connectedness. Even though this generation is expected to be the prevailing customer base around the world by 2026, there is a noticeable lack of studies on GenZ’s consumer characteristics within the hospitality context. This study investigates the marketing-related factors affecting GenZ’s accommodation decisions as well as their consumer sensitivities to contemporary constructs such as brand uniqueness, social media presentability, sustainability consciousness, and cancel culture.

Live streaming has emerged as a new medium for the creation and dissemination of travel experiences, product marketing and destination promotion. Empirical studies on live streamers’ motivations and travel behavior in tourism live streaming are currently under-explored. This study adopted a live streamer perspective and followed a qualitative approach to 1) explore the motivations and travel behaviour of live streamers in tourism, and 2) investigate the process of customer-to-customer real-time value co-creation of the live streamer with other stakeholders by drawing on the Porter-Lawler model. Findings provide in-depth understanding of live streamers’ motivations for engaging in tourism live streaming and the influence of viewers on live streamers. Recommendations are also offered to tourism live streaming platforms regarding how to develop a better incentive strategy for live streamers.

The aim of the paper is to provide practical insights into a cultural tourism co-creation platform for building a service platform ecosystem from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives. Drawing on the service dominant logic and service ecosystem literature, the paper provides a comprehensive literature review and multiple stakeholder perspectives on the construction of a cultural tourism co-creation platform for the digital practice of Mogao Grottos. Four key actors of cultural tourism co-creation platforms from a service ecosystem perspective are identified, including platform owners, platform partners, technological providers, and platform customers, and the paper explores the actions and strengths of these actors. To the authors’ knowledge, this study represents one of the early attempts to investigate the possible consequences of building a cultural tourism co-creation platform for destination organization management.

The advance of technologies has profoundly changed customers’ expectation and behaviors, as well as companies’ business processes and business models. Given the critical importance of digital transformation, surprisingly, there is scarce research documenting and sharing the knowledge, experience, and insights from digital transformation practitioners, especially in the tourism domain. This research aims to understand the perspectives and actions of Swiss tourism stakeholders in pursuing the digital transformation process. The research data was collected through interviews with tourism stakeholders. The interviews were analyzed through both theme identification and human synthesis. The findings are tourism stakeholders conduct digital transformation for better customer experiences, operation efficiency and profitability, and data collection for better management. Digital transformation needs technology as the tool and data as input and output while keeping in mind that all decisions should be customer-centric. The challenges include data ownership, various data formats, data analysis, and data sharing. Yet, stakeholders are optimistic about the future of digital transformation and willing to collaborate. Both technology and the right digital mindset are required to succeed in digital transformation. Technology can be used to save employees from repetitive tasks and focus on human interactions to create customer-centric experiences. Nevertheless, technology should never replace the human aspect of hospitality.

The key to creating genuinely transformative travel experiences lies in effective communication strategies. By engaging with an audience through meaningful and thought-provoking content, tourism organisations can inspire them to fulfil their life's purpose and embark on a journey of personal growth and discovery. Whether through inspiring stories, beautiful imagery, or practical tips and advice, the right content can help connect with an audience on a deeper level and create unforgettable travel experiences. This study reviewed the literature on eudaimonic communication and analysed the textual content on selected companies’ web pages. By identifying specific elements and their absence, the study aimed to enhance the effectiveness of webpage communication, ultimately leading to a transformative response in the end-user. As a result, it was clear that elements of transformative and eudaimonic communication appeared on web pages, but the way they were used did not support transformation.

The article discusses the growing popularity of eSports events and aims to understand the parents’ perspective towards eSports and eSports events. As the growth of eSport events presents an opportunity of the tourism industry. The study used a qualitative approach utilising a semi-structured interview. The discussion of this semi-structured interviews forms part of a greater research study on eSports in South Africa, and these results are just preliminary results from an eSport event held high school in May 2023. The study found that parents have a positive perspective towards eSports events and are supportive of their children participating in them. The study also found that eSports events are relatively new and that there is a lack of research on parents’ perspective of eSports tournaments. The study recommends further research to understand the motivations of participants and spectators to attend on-site eSports events, the expenses of children participating in eSports, and the benefits of eSports as an event. The article also defines eSports and the different types of eSports games, and discusses the adoption of eSports as a sport. The study provides valuable insights into the growing popularity of eSports events and the need for further research in this area.

This paper examines the employee lifecycle, that is, HR managers’ role in decision-making. In tourism, HR faces unique challenges, e.g. labor shortage, staff turnover, diversity management. Algorithmic management, driven by data, is introduced as significant but ethically complex management strategy. The uses LEGO Serious Play to gather insights from managers (n = 17) and identifies eight potential use-cases for algorithmic control along the employee lifecycle. Implications for tourism management and research are discussed.

This short research paper explores the experiences and transformations of employed remote workers who engage in remote work trips, a type of digital nomad-inspired travel where individuals combine work and leisure while traveling. The study aims to understand the meaning of these experiences and their impact on participants’ work practices. The methodology employed in this study is Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology, which focuses on subjective interpretations of experiences. Data was collected between 2022 and 2023 through prolonged engagement with seven participants who have work flexibility but do not identify as digital nomads. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to empathize with the participants’ experiences. The study highlights that remote work travel is not perceived as a typical vacation experience and differs from digital nomadism. The dimension of self-awareness at work emerged, revealing a range of feelings toward work arrangements in new environments. Some participants felt balanced and healthier, while others felt a lack of motivation. Overall, the experiences made participants more aware of their work style preferences that potentially benefits enterprises as well.

Content-based restaurant recommender systems use features such as cuisine type, price range, and location to suggest dining options to users. Current research explores ways to improve their effectiveness. In this work, we explore different ideas on how to build a recommender system. We explore TF-IDF as a baseline and the state-of-the-art model SBERT. These ideas are tested on a real-world data-set of a digital restaurant guide. Evaluation involves both qualitative assessment by a domain expert and quantitative analysis. The results show that, with proper preprocessing, TF-IDF can achieve similar scores to SBERT and, depending on the scenario, even better results. However, SBERT still provides more novel recommendations than TF-IDF. Depending on the scenario, both models can be used to generate meaningful restaurant recommendations. However, more implicit aspects like a restaurant’s atmosphere can hardly be captured by these models.

The study employs a qualitative research methodology, involving interviews with experts and hoteliers to explore their understanding and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the hospitality industry. The interviews focused on the participants’ perception of IT adoption, the benefits and challenges of adopting AI technologies, and the factors influencing AI adoption. The data analysis was carried out with deductive coding following the literature review and interpreted using the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework. This framework helped classify the factors influencing AI adoption into technological, organizational, and environmental factors. The study reveals a mismatch between experts and hoteliers’ understanding of AI and indicates a need for a comprehensive and targeted approach to educating hoteliers about AI's benefits, challenges, strategic and operational implications, and providing a clear roadmap for its integration into existing systems and processes. This study underscores the critical gap in the industry's ability to fully leverage available technologies without external assistance and the necessity to bridge this gap to facilitate AI adoption in the hospitality sector.

Tourism is a sector that has a substantial economic impact on countries. With the advancement of technology, personalized solutions have become essential in the tourism sector. Building a user profile is the most common method to personalize a system. Personalization in the travel industry aims to provide travelers with the same level of support that they would receive from an assistant who knows them best. This can be achieved by analyzing the traveler’s previous activities, demographic information, and characteristics as a traveler. Various new technologies have started to be used in tourism, and one of them is blockchain, which can be a critical element in the tourism industry in the following years. Travelers must present their identification at various points throughout their trip. Blockchain-based identification technology allows users to go paperless throughout their journey. Digital transactions can enhance the payment experience for visitors at tourism destinations. Destinations that offer digital payment services are viewed as smart tourist hotspots and tend to be more successful in attracting visitors. In this perspective, we added a digital payment system to our system. In this project, as a sub-part of the Celtics-Next project, SmarTravel, we planned to develop the personalized tourism system of the future, in which the customer is the focus, with three institutions: Setur Tourism Agency, Turkcell Technology, and Paycell. We hope that our project will set an example of how payment processes and blockchain-based identification can be integrated into customer-oriented smart systems.

Technologies have changed our world rapidly and have also reshaped the tourism and hospitality industry. Organizations need to innovate to fulfil their customers’ changing needs and wishes. Students therefore need to be well prepared to enter the changing working field. Since innovation is a must, they need to learn how to use their creativity to design innovative concepts, making use of technology and data. This process can be stimulated and guided in a creativity process using the Smart Hospitality Wheel. This wheel has been developed for education, but the results in this study show its effectiveness in the industry as well. This paper introduces the development and use of the Smart Hospitality Wheel; a tool to come up with innovative ideas at the start of a design process. It stresses the importance of the use of the wheel in tourism and hospitality to design competitive and innovative concepts, describes the research method, shows some first results, and explores contributions and further research. The design and use of the wheel combined with the unique combination of theory linked to smartness and hospitality, creates a novel tool to use in the creativity process to design innovative and competitive concepts for the tourism and hospitality industry.

Data spaces enable public and private actors to connect and exchange their data assets, creating an environment for product and service innovations. This applied research provides insights into perceived values, necessary features, governance and business model requirements for designing the sustainable European Data Space for Tourism (ETDS) from the point of view of the European tourism experts. A two-round Delphi study revealed a moderate consensus around ETDS’s data quality control measures, value creation, and key features. In contrast, the agreement regarding the governing body or business model was missing. Hence, no one-size-fit-all solution can meet the needs of all tourism stakeholders.

In recent years the ecological impact of Tourism has been more and more considered, raising the issue of how to ensure higher levels of sustainability. Especially when it comes to flights, the issue of energy consumption and of exploring strategies to reduce the CO2 footprint of civil aviation has attracted a special attention, in particular while taking into account the so-called attitude-behavior gap, which describes major discrepancies between what people say about their commitment to sustainability and what they actually do when taking decisions. A possible strategy to address such issues is leveraging on “nudges” while persons are exploring available flights on an online travel agency’s platform (OTA), ensuring that they are adequately informed and offered good – more sustainable – alternatives. Based on the current literature and on the analyzed cases, this study presents a first map of twelve possible types of nudges, organized in four main categories: CO2 emissions, transportation mode, CO2 compensation, and sustainability efforts. Moreover, it shows their actual, quite limited, presence on ten major OTAs.

This paper examines the phenomenon of influencers with a special focus on the tourism industry. The question arises whether self-portrayal within a gender-stereotypical framework correlates positively with success and the number of followers. To this end, the profiles of twelve tourism influencers and their posted content in the first half of 2023 were analyzed. With the help of quantitative content analysis, we examined 427 photos of tourism influencers on the Instagram platform. The results show that while female tourism influencers more often present themselves in a sexualized way and focus on themselves and their bodies, male tourism influencers put their competencies in the foreground. In this way, both female and male influencers comply with their expected gender roles – in addition to the body, a presentation of socially expected actions and attributes is also in the foreground. The results are discussed against the background of social sustainability.

This study investigated how three different types of revenge travel - more expensive trips, longer stays, and more frequent travel - are affected by the combination of consumers’ perceived constraints, negotiation, and compromises. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) on a sample of 500 survey responses, this study identified similar and distinctive patterns for each type of the revenge travel. By enhancing our understanding of the revenge travelers across different types, this study offers insights for industry managers and policymakers in developing better strategies to facilitate recovery in tourism following a crisis.

As with the development of digital technology, increasing older adults have used digital technologies in different stages of their travel. While advocating the positive aspects of digital usage among older adults, the downside has been largely neglected. Moreover, older adults vary in their backgrounds, lifestyles, digital competence and specific needs. When seeking appropriate solutions to enhance their digital travel experience, it is important to initially profile the diverse subgroups and delineate their specific preferences. This study adopted a humanisation perspective and a qualitative approach to 1) understand senior tourists’ digital travel experience, 2) explore senior tourists’ needs and requirements regarding digital travel, and 3) develop a senior tourists’ digital travel experience typology. Findings provide rich contributions in understanding senior tourists’ digital use and the humanised digital travel experience. Recommendations are also offered to destinations, tourism service providers and care providers regarding how to develop an age friendly destination digital environment.

Overtourism has become a significant concern in many popular travel destinations around the world. As one of considerable approaches to handle the overtourism issues, congestion-aware methods can be effective in mitigating overcrowding at popular attractions by spreading tourists to less-visited areas. However, they may lead to a potential Hawk-Dove game: tourists who share the same preference may have some of them assigned worse routes than others to avoid congestion, which raises a possibility that the tourists who are assigned to relatively unfavorable routes may feel dissatisfaction and unfairness. Most existing research focuses on alleviating congestion from an overall planner perspective through simulation studies, with little emphasis on actual user experience. In this study, we conducted a user survey on congestion-aware route recommendation in Kyoto, Japan, aiming to investigate the evaluation of congestion-aware route recommendation methods from each tourist’s personal perspective and to clarify the development status and future research directions of congestion-aware route recommendation methods. We choose five congestion-aware route recommendation methods that vary in their consideration of congestion and multi-agent interactions. We reveal the strengths and weaknesses of these methods from multiple aspects. We cluster the respondents based on their text responses and explore the differences between these clusters. Furthermore, we investigate the factors affecting tourists’ experience and compare the differences among groups of tourists.

We propose U-KyotoTrip, a travel planning system designed for user-experience-oriented trips in Kyoto, Japan. U-KyotoTrip integrates extensive content analysis of user-generated content, Point-Of-Interest (POI) recommendations, and route recommendations, with the aim of assisting users in acquiring information and travel planning. To capture new users’ preferences, we propose user-friendly ask-to-rate methods to handle cold-start user scenarios. Furthermore, we employ five route recommendation methods that vary in their consideration for congestion and tourism diversification to address the overtourism problem. An empirical user study was conducted to evaluate U-KyotoTrip, revealing that users are satisfied with the system, particularly the approach that utilizes photos to present their preferences.

Personalized recommendations have played a vital role in tourism, serving various purposes, ranging from an improved visitor experience to addressing sustainability issues. However, research shows that recommendations are more likely to be accepted by visitors if they are comprehensible and appeal to the visitors’ common sense. This highlights the importance of explainable recommendations that, according to a previously specified goal, explain an algorithm’s inference process, generate trust among visitors, or educate visitors by making them aware of sustainability practices. Based on this motivation, our paper proposes a visual, interactive approach to exploring recommendation explanations tailored to tourism. Agnostic to the underlying recommendation algorithm and the defined explainability goal, our approach leverages knowledge graphs to generate model-specific and post-hoc explanations. We demonstrate and evaluate our approach based on a prototypical dashboard implementing our concept. Following the results of our evaluation, our dashboard helps explain recommendations of arbitrary models, even in complex scenarios.

Generative AI has become a disruptive force for the Tourism industry. While its potential for generating unique content has been acknowledged, its feasibility for tourists remains unclear. This paper analyses ChatGPT as an itinerary planner. It compares ChatGPT-generated itineraries for 3 destinations with those developed by tourism experts. The evaluation of 11 quality criteria demonstrates that ChatGPT creates easy-to-understand and accessible but less accurate and less specific itineraries. It is a good starting point for travel inspiration. However, it currently cannot serve as an exclusive tool for trip planning.

User-generated content (UGC) created and distributed through social media and tourism-related websites provides potential travelers the opportunity to gain first-hand experiences about destination products and services. UGC is also of great value to tourism service providers. Since UGC represents customers’ opinions and experience outcomes, potential problems, but also drivers behind customer delight can be identified. In this regard, also temporal changes regarding customer requirements can be determined. The aim of this paper is to identify how certain topic areas mentioned in UGC affect customer satisfaction, exemplarily analyzed for the Lake of Constance Region. Furthermore, potential temporal changes regarding customer satisfaction since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic will be examined. A sentiment analysis, topic detection and regression analysis are carried out on two datasets containing UGC before and after the outbreak of the pandemic. Findings show that the pandemic has changed customers’ attitudes towards certain topic areas.

Online reviews (ORs) have garnered interdisciplinary attention, notably in hospitality and tourism. Despite their significance, concerns about OR credibility persist. Destination Management Organizations increasingly recognize ORs as valuable sources of firsthand, authentic feedback from consumers. However, there remains a dearth of cross-continental investigations into ORs, particularly concerning themes discussed by local and international travelers across various destinations. To address this gap, we employ Latent Dirichlet Analysis—a probabilistic technique to extract topics from a given corpus—to examine 10350 TripAdvisor reviews from 12 destinations in Ghana and Indonesia. Our analysis reveals shared concerns among domestic and international travelers regarding activities, destination attractions, local staff attitudes, and positive visitor experiences. This study advances insights, highlights limitations, and lays the groundwork for future research.

This study examines the cognitive image of Austria as a travel destination through Instagram content posted by travel influencers. The study also investigates how the account type, influencer type, and posting frequency affect user engagement. Machine learning techniques and statistical analysis are used to analyze the data. The study found that influencers contribute to Austria's destination image mainly through content about the Alps, Vienna, and cycling. The study provides insights into successful destination promotion on Instagram through influencer marketing. Micro-influencers who post regularly with relevant content are ideal for DMOs. Meso-influencers and verified accounts receive more likes for less popular themes, while micro-influencers are sufficient for more popular themes. It is also disadvantageous for meso-influencers to be perceived as commercial accounts and not to post as often as emerging influencers.

Social Media has become an important marketing tool for destinations due to its easy access, ability to reach broad audiences and capacity to act as a form of eWOM. Instagram in particular is one of the most popular channels for the visual marketing of a destination as well as for influencer marketing. Through Instagram, DMOs can create travel inspiration, and enhance interest in a destination. This study seeks to understand the tourists’ perceptions of Instagram influencers as well as official DMO accounts and looks on their influence on tourists’ participation and engagement on social media. A quantitative survey was conducted to analyze users’ perceptions of DMO and influencer accounts on Instagram, as well as their participation behavior online. The study found that DMOs are perceived as being more trustworthy and credible than travel influencers. In addition, results indicate that active Instagram users are more likely to have positive perceptions of travel influencers, but online participation does not influence perceptions of DMOs.

The field of tourism has recently undergone a revolutionary transformation, driven by the rapid expansion of digital platforms and the simultaneous rise of influencer culture. The convergence of these factors has led to a noticeable realignment in how tourists perceive travel destinations. Influencers now play a central role, leveraging genuine and superficial credibility and expertise in specific domains. This phenomenon has captured the attention of scholars, practitioners, and policymakers, catalyzing a wave of research aimed at delving into the multifaceted intersection of influencers and tourism. This article presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis to examine the scholarly output related to influencers and tourism over the past decade. This methodology provides a comprehensive overview, unveiling an abundant and diverse work. The study identifies 196 articles published between 2005 and 2023, involving 504 authors across 123 journals. Cluster analyses highlight a dynamic and nuanced recomposition of subthemes, reflective of an evolving reality in the making.

Online reviews play a crucial role in shaping consumer decisions, particularly in the hospitality industry where the intangibility of services creates uncertainty. The lack of a standardized approach to measure the quality of hotels based on online reviews poses challenges for consumers and businesses alike. In the past, there have been various attempts to create a global index of average accommodation scores. However, all of them presented serious deficiencies in terms of transparency and level of dissemination, failing to achieve the expected success. To address these challenges, the study proposes the establishment of a rational reputation standard for accommodation services through online reviews. A Delphi method is proposed to seek consensus among academic experts and hotel managers, aiming to prioritize criteria for creating a transparent algorithm and a reliable global index for comparing accommodation establishments. The proposed rational reputation standard aims to empower consumers, allowing them to make informed decisions, while benefiting the hospitality industry by promoting transparency and credibility, as well as to allow public authorities with knowledge to establish a quality standard based on online reviews.

Nowadays, video-sharing social media platforms have become essential sources of information for tourists. In line with this trend, many destination marketing organizations (DMOs) formulate marketing strategies utilizing video-sharing platforms. Nevertheless, despite the extensive research on the impacts of advertising video exposure, there is a notable absence of studies that delve into the influence of user-generated content on the cognitive effect of potential tourists on destinations. To address this gap, this study aims to identify the cognitive effects based on the presence of comments (vs. absent) and different positive comment types (absent vs. opinion vs. impression vs. compliment comments) through a field experiment design. We found that the cognitive effect of YouTube videos is higher when positive comments are available. Further, impression comments had a more significant cognitive effect than the other comment types. Building upon our research findings, we propose strategies for utilizing video social media platforms from the perspective of tourism destination marketers.

The popularity of short-form video platforms and content creation tools has grown significantly in recent years, leading to increased consumption of travel-related visual content. A growing number of potential tourists are actively engaging with short-form travel videos (STVs). While previous studies have highlighted the importance of music in STVs, the research mechanisms and frameworks to investigate its impact remain unclear. Therefore, this study develops a research model based on resonance theory and the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) model, aiming to investigate the influence of music congruity with various video elements (e.g., tempo, copywriting, style, destination attributes) within STVs presented on social media. Through a scenario-based experiment, this study attempts to confirm the role of music and video aesthetics as key factors in evoking emotional resonance and shaping users’ behaviour. The findings could also suggest that emotional resonance could directly influence users’ sharing intentions and impulsive travel intentions. These findings are expected to provide valuable insights for destination marketers and travel content creators.