Thirty Years of Research on Application of Technology in Tourism and Hospitality Industry: A Systematic Literature Review

In the fourth industrial revolution, the application or adoption of technology in the tourism and hospitality industry became mainstream and received significant attention from research scholars. But application of Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to elucidate the dynamics of technology in the tourism and hospitality industry has hardly been experimented in any prior research. Therefore, the literature gap pertaining to the nexus of technology and tourism industry is addressed in this chapter. Although the literature in tourism has extensively discussed technology application or adoption in tourism and hospitality industry, the research structure in this field remained scattered and fragmented. The current chapter is intended to bridge the gap and is attempted to achieve three goals. First, to understand the corpus of research on “Application and Adoption of technology in tourism and hospitality”, SLR is conducted only based on research articles extracted from Web of Science and Scopus on the specified topic using some specific search strings to unfold the corpus of research on use and adoption of technology in tourism and hospitality industry. To conduct the SLR, the study adopts four bibliometric analysis process named-co-citation, network visualization through co-occurrence data, multi-dimensional scaling, and hierarchical cluster analysis that shed light on the intellectual structure on technology application in tourism industry. Second, the chapter illuminates on how the technology shape tourism in a new form. Third, the chapter delineates the models and theories that were addressed in the previous studies to describe how technology is applied and adopted in the tourism industry. The findings of the study help the researchers and academicians to understand the research trends in this area and how knowledge structure has been evolved over the years.