Abstract
This systematic review adopts a formal and structured approach to review the intersection of data science and smart tourism destinations in terms of components found in previous research. The study period corresponds to 1995–2021 focusing the analysis mainly on the last years (2015–2021), identifying and characterizing the current trends on this research topic. The review comprises documentary research based on bibliometric and conceptual analysis, using the VOSviewer and SciMAT software to analyze articles from the Web of Science database. There is growing interest in this research topic, with more than 300 articles published annually. Data science technologies on which current smart destinations research is based include big data, smart data, data analytics, social media, cloud computing, the internet of things (IoT), smart card data, geographic information system (GIS) technologies, open data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Critical research areas for data science techniques and technologies in smart destinations are public tourism marketing, mobility-accessibility, and sustainability. Data analysis techniques and technologies face unprecedented challenges and opportunities post-coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) to build on the huge amount of data and a new tourism model that is more sustainable, smarter, and safer than those previously implemented.
Highlights
We currently travel with many digital devices and media that form part of our daily activity: tourism in the twenty-first century is characterized by a hyper-connected tourist profile
We aimed to summarize the main features of the cross-analysis of the existing literature on data science and smart destinations, comprehensively answering the following research questions: Q1: What is the importance in the current literature of the term data science in terms of tourism destination management in line with the concept of smart destinations?
Based on the 2,028 articles obtained from the systematic information search published between the years 1995 and 2021, we obtained results that are presented in the following six sections: The first results section introduces the most representative keywords obtained through a search with the 35 themes or techniques of analysis and technologies of data science
Summary
We currently travel with many digital devices and media that form part of our daily activity: tourism in the twenty-first century is characterized by a hyper-connected tourist profile. Tourists are heavy users of social networks, producing a huge amount of data, an internet trail, or a digital footprint (Encalada et al, 2017) that companies frequently use to obtain valuable information. This is true in the tourism sector. This scientific literature review provides an in-depth examination of the intersection between data science and smart destinations, focusing on previous bibliometric studies and systematic literature reviews on tourism and smart destinations (Haobin Ye et al, 2020; Mehraliyev et al, 2020; Bastidas-Manzano et al, 2021; Lee et al, 2021). It includes references to the evolution of information and communication technology (ICT) and tourism (Buhalis and Law, 2008; Law et al, 2014).
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