what is tourism utilization

• Business Management

Tourism Satisfaction: Importance, Measurability & Impacts

January 05, 2020 •

5 min reading

These questions and more were covered at EHL’s 3 rd Annual Hospitality Finance & Economics Research Conference, with keynote speaker Dr. Gang Li.

As a hospitality business leader, or destination management professional, what do you need to know about tourism? Does it help you to know where tourists go most and how much money that adds to the economy? Maybe so, but the most important factors for your business are what pleases tourists the most and what makes them grow your business as satisfied customers.

The steady growth of tourism reflects an important evolution in human economic and leisure activities and this is how it is currently measured: “It is one of the world's largest and fastest-growing economic sectors, supporting one in 10 jobs (319 million) worldwide and generating 10.4% of world GD.” ( WTTC 2019 )

The industry collects data about the economic contribution, numbers of arrivals, jobs created and the popularity of destinations. Even with Online Travel Review sites, such as TripAdvisor, nobody is really measuring tourist happiness and the impact of tourism on well-being, yet these are the insights that would help hospitality businesses and destinations to perform better in the future.

These issues were addressed by keynote speaker Dr. Gang Li at EHL’s 3 rd Annual Hospitality Finance & Economics Research Conference. Dr. Gang Li is a Professor of Tourism and Economics at the University of Surrey (UK) where he is also the Director of International Relations for the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, and the Lead of the Competitiveness of the Visitor Economy research group in the school. He devised an index system for measuring tourism satisfaction and the impact on tourists’ well-being, and the results of this research could be very useful for shaping tourism experiences.

An Index for Tourism Satisfaction and Well-Being, by Dr. Gang Li

Dr. Gang Li began building his index to determine how to best measure tourism satisfaction, and whether or not tourism is good for people. As he pointed out, the pursuit of happiness is a major focus of people’s lives and also of indices, these days. Indeed, Switzerland owes its popularity in part to its frequent rating among the happiest countries in the world. So, if tourists are seeking happiness, then their happiness – not just the amount of money they spent, or the places they went – should be the measure to shape the future of tourism.

Measuring tourism satisfaction is important for several reasons, outlined in Dr. Li’s presentation:

• Satisfied tourists stay longer, spend more and come back
• They promote the provider on social media and online ratings, thereby contributing to business and destination competitiveness
• They bring friends and family on their next visit
• Satisfaction with vacation time impacts their overall quality of life
• Tourism is about consuming an unknown product in unfamiliar surroundings, and is classified as an “export” in economic terms

How to measure tourism satisfaction

In order to correctly measure tourism satisfaction, Dr. Li considered many factors which could be evaluated by collecting the responses of tourists after their experience, using questionnaires or interviews. Some of the key elements were:

• Expectations versus reality : subjects must be asked what they expected and how that expectation was met or not
• Satisfaction must be measured for every part of the experience : Transportation, Immigration, Accommodation, Food & Beverage, Feature Experiences
• The data must include personal factors such as age and gender
• Capturing the data must be done quickly at the end of the experience , as a feeling of satisfaction or an intention to log a complaint may fade with time

As Dr. Li explained, “Destination Management Organizations, tour operators and amusement parks may be interested in this data because if we can identify what makes a tourist have a good experience, then they can direct their energy to improve the most important aspects for tourists and thereby improve the overall reputation of the destination or provider.”

Four keys to a happy tourist

Using these methods to evaluate a tourism experience in South Africa, Dr. Li came to some conclusions about the results:

• High-cost experiences generally equal less happiness because the product does not seem to be worth the cost
• High-quality experiences make people happy and often feature interactive and interpersonal experiences, sensory experiences (touch, taste, smell, etc.) and humorous, fun or exciting activities and people (guides, staff)
• Any disagreement or complaint makes a negative overall impact , so providers must be on the lookout for signs of dissatisfaction and identify and correct problem areas in their service or product
• Good tourism experiences create well-being that spills over into other areas of life . Therefore, it is not unfair to market tourism as something that changes and shapes one’s life, but the experience has to live up to the expectations

In the end, the index system is a first experiment in measuring tourism satisfaction, and this study creates a solid framework for further work. These findings give a good idea of where the emphasis should go for measuring satisfaction for destinations and tourism-facing business, such as a tourism agency or tour provider. It also leaves a lot of room for further development, and shows that there are key elements that could be measured for different types of tourism (cruises versus air-travel), and for different populations.

The future of destination management

According to Dr. Li, the future of destination management is going to play out in three main areas: smart cities, personalized or targeted guest experiences and a better cohabitation between tourists and local people. He said, “I’ve seen a lot of research and effort going into creating smart cities. In China, they are working on making several of the most visited cities smart cities. They are making it possible to gather the data about where people are, what they are doing, automating some alerts and increasing services in response to high or low demand. This technology is already within our reach and through the mobile phones, we can know where people are, in what concentration.”

Satisfaction data could also be useful in designing a unique visitor experience depending on guests’ profiles, he pointed out. “Within an entertainment park, for example, if you could see what areas of a park are most enjoyed by certain customers depending on gender, age etc., then you could design guided tours and activities for those groups to increase their enjoyment of the park experience.”

Bridging the gap from research to application

At the end of his presentation, Dr. Li was humble about the implications of his research, he said, “As an academic, I can say that we focus first on getting the data right and making a reliable system, making sure it works, we don’t often have time to reach out the industry professionals to encourage them to adopt the framework. We need a bridge, people to take the learnings and adapt it to a professional level. The industry can’t use our research findings alone, they need interpretation and adaptation for their region. For example, a provider or hotel in one city or region may not be able to apply the learnings from another region. This is why indices are useful, if they work, then they can be applied to other projects in the industry for benchmarking purposes.”

EHL hosts these types of conferences to create that bridge between research and academia and the industry. Being close to the industry, EHL is attuned to their needs for applied research and through the EHL Advisory Services branch, they connect businesses and institutions with the consultants who can take this type of research and extend or apply it to a business case.

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Chapter 14. Back to the Big Picture: Globalization and Trends

14.1 Globalization and the Tourism Industry

In today’s integrated and interdependent world, multiple forces represent both opportunities and threats to tourism. This chapter explores the topic of globalization and how it relates to tourism, and then examines trends (political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental influences — PESTLE ). The chapter closes with a reflection on what all this means for tourism in British Columbia.

Depending on the focus of the discussion, globalization can be defined in several ways. One broad definition is:

A complex web of social processes that intensify and expand worldwide economic, cultural, political and technological exchanges and connections (Campbell, MacKinnon, & Stevens, 2011, p. 4).

Globalization can also be simply described as the movement of goods, ideas, values, and people around the world. The term was first used in the early 1950s to recognize the increasing interdependence of economies and societies around the world. Globalization, however, has existed for centuries by way of evolving trade routes, including the slave trade, colonization, and immigration.

Today, we are divided into separate countries, each looking out for its own national self-interest, with all its flaws and benefits. At the same time, other entities such as multinational corporations cross borders, which leads to global economic and political integration. Many benefits can result from global integration and interdependence, but we also need to heed its negative effects.

We can look at the relationship between globalization and tourism in several ways. For the purposes of this chapter, we will consider the impact of tourism and travel on globalization, and the impact of globalization on tourism. But first, let’s keep in mind why it is important for a local tour operator, general manager, or tourism business owner to think about globalization. More importantly, let’s consider where we should be looking to understand globalization and future trends. The rest of this chapter will address these topics.

The Impact of Globalization on Tourism

We can assess the impact of globalization on tourism from a number of perspectives. Here, we will discuss five examples: global mobility and ease of travel; population and demographic trends; terrorism, safety, and security; increased awareness of new destinations; and poverty.

Global Mobility and Ease of Travel

The advances made in transportation that have enabled global mobility are particularly significant. Modern aircraft, cruise ships, trains, and other modes of transport allow people to move quickly and relatively cheaply. Aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner have opened new routes by creating an aircraft capable of flying “long haul” distances with a smaller passenger load. Fast trains, road systems, and even city bike rental programs enable people to move, tour, and explore the world. These changes have allowed more people to travel more often in less time.

Ease of travel has also helped to overcome the barriers of fear, frustration, and expense. For example, an international banking system allows access to money almost anywhere in the world. Multinational corporations, which provide flights, local transportation, and accommodation and food, have allowed for “one-stop shopping” for travel bookings. Mobile devices have also changed the nature of travel in terms of what travellers do and how they interact with a destination, making it easier to, for example, select a restaurant, navigate a big city, or translate a foreign language. As a result, there are fewer unexplored places in the world anymore.

The ease of travel has also facilitated the rapid global transfer of viruses. While spread owing to global air travel has occurred in other outbreaks such as SARS in 2003, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 illustrates the new challenges faced by the air transportation system. The willingness for quick action to contain future viruses means that airlines will need to be ready, willing and able to terminate travel routes upon any notice of health concerns.

Population and Demographic Trends

According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2019a), the world population reached 7.7 billion in 2019 and is projected to exceed 9.7 billion by 2050. The population continues to increase, but not uniformly across the world. The overall global population rate of increase is slowing but birth and death rates are vastly different between developed and developing nations (UNDESA, 2019b). For instance, among developed countries, there is a growing percentage of people over 65 that will reach 25% by 2050 (UNDESA 2019a). With a smaller percentage engaged in the workforce, there will be implications on social and health services. Globally, the people under the age of 24 will decline in every region of the world. Among developing countries, half the global growth between 2019 and 2050 will come from Sub-Saharan Africa. For instance, Nigeria will double its population to 4 million by 2050 (UNDESA 2019b). The two most populous countries, India and China will also experience different trajectories; India will surpass China as the most populous country in the world by 2027 (UNDESA 2019b).

Other critical population trends affecting global development and tourism include the following (UNDESA 2019c; UNDESA 2019d):

• By 2100, approximately 40% of the world’s total population is expected to be African. While birth rates are tending to fall around the world, they are still higher across Africa than in most other parts of the globe. This could result in a youth dividend or further exacerbate problems on the African continent.
• More people are migrating than ever before, with 272 million recent migrants in 2019 alone compared with about 175 million in 2000. The top five destinations are the United States, Germany, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom.
• Some 55% of the global population is urban, and the urbanization trend is expected to continue as people search for more jobs, more social and health services, and more activities. Not everyone benefits equally though, as housing and other infrastructure struggles to keep up with the growing urban population.

To keep up with all of these changes in demographics, destinations will need to provide products and services to suit the older, culturally diverse, multi-generational travellers as well as the adventurous youth. Additionally, hiring and retaining staff will require a rethinking of human resource policies and procedures, compensation, and other aspects for the changing population of employees.

Terrorism, Safety, and Security

Terrorist attacks and political unrest globally have certainly disrupted tourism, but not halted it. The areas most affected, of course, are those where unrest has occurred and has been the focus of extensive media attention. A global terrorism index produced by the Institute of Economics and Peace (2019) shows that while fatalities from terrorism have declined since 2015, the number of affected countries, 71, is the highest since 2002. Of note is the rise in far-right terrorism in western countries, with an increase of 320% over the past five years (p. 4).

The 2020 global pandemic for COVID-19 resulted in a massive and sudden transformation in the relationship between safety and travel. Starting in early March, 2020, the Canadian government moved toward closing the borders and curtailing outbound and inbound travel. These efforts were to, at first, contain the spread of the virus internationally, evolving toward a national quarantine to “flatten the curve” of number of people effected. Clearly, the pandemic has changed how we travel, and how we define safety of travel in a global setting.

While safety and security may not be the driving reasons for tourists selecting a particular destination, certainly a lack of safety and security often eliminates a location from travellers’ “wish lists.” Safety and security for travellers is becoming more important as countries move to protect their citizens. Government agencies around the world produce advisories and warnings for their citizens to stay away from dangerous locations and political unrest.

Take a Closer Look: Travel Advisories

Travel advisories serve as warning systems for people from specific countries to avoid particular destinations because of actual or potential threats to citizens. To learn more about advisories for specific countries, see the Canadian government web page at Canada’s Travel Advisories and compare them to Australia’s Travel Advisories , the United States’ Travel Advisories , and the United Kingdom’s Travel Advisories .

The focus on safety and security has had several impacts on travellers. Most notably, security at most airports has been increased in an effort to protect people and planes (Flight Global, 2015). Screening procedures can take longer and some items are no longer allowed on board. Other security requirements, such as showing passports and providing fingerprints, have been implemented for entry into some countries. While all acts of terrorism cannot be stopped, the tourism industry is attempting to provide as much safety and security as it can.

Increased Awareness of New Destinations

Another influence of globalization on tourism is a greater awareness of destinations and the range of leisure activities, sites, and cultures to visit around the world. Generating knowledge of a destination is obviously a key first step in marketing a destination, and this is achieved by way of travel shows, films, social media, and other forms of communication. The competition to attract visitors is fierce considering the sheer number of places available for travel; it can be easy to get lost in the noise of global competition.

Globalization has contributed to increased demand for goods and services and overall economic growth, with the result of global poverty having decreased over the years. However, at the same time, the gap between the richest and poorest has expanded. A significant portion of the world’s population is simply unable to participate in, or benefit from, tourism. The economic gains from a tourism economy in a developing country such as Honduras versus a developed country such as Canada is unequal. Simply put, not everyone has the same opportunities to profit. Environmental costs are also unevenly distributed in the world, with poor countries lacking the resources to adapt to impacts (such as droughts, increased disease, soil erosion), and shouldering the majority of the repercussions of phenomena such as global warming.

Another way to analyze the interplay between tourism and globalization is to consider the reverse view: the impact of tourism on globalization.

Impact of Tourism on Globalization

In this section, we will look at tourism as a global force — for peace, for cultural homogenization, for commodifying cultures, and for shaping the way we see the world.

Tourism as a Force for Peace

In the 1980s, a popular hypothesis was that tourism supported global peace by allowing travellers to learn about other cultures and meet people from other nations, as well as offering benefits accrued from international business. Peace is an obvious requirement for tourism if the industry is to be robust and sustainable. However, to date, there is little empirical evidence to support the claim that tourism fosters peace, however attractive as the idea may be. However, there is a growing body of research on the relationship between tourism, social justice, and human security, both negative and positive. Clearly, the simple presence of tourism does not immediately equate to societal benefit. Careful planning and a focus on policies supporting community well-being and sustainability are required.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are important for tourism organizations to take into account. They help in guiding the evolution of tourism and travel toward a more positive and hopeful form of tourism as well as enabling a more sustainable, and peaceful, future.

Tourism as Cultural Homogenizer

Nevertheless, tourism does offer the opportunity to teach people about how to respect other cultures. Whereas some argue that globalization has a homogenizing effect on cultures, as Western values are spread through music, fashion, film, and food, rendering one culture indistinguishable from the next. But tourism cannot be viewed as the only means of transmitting western values.

Some beliefs and values, such as embracing equality, inclusion, and diversity, or the need to protect children from harm, should be shared around the world. In the context of tourism and travel, these values are significant. For instance, companies need to ensure that their human resource practices are consistent and fair throughout the world. Exploiting children for sex is illegal, punishable in both the country visited and the home country of the tourist; some airlines and hotels are actively involved in supporting the prohibition of child sex tourism. Travellers are expected not to deface heritage sites or take rare or endangered natural or cultural objects as souvenirs. Such regulations speak to the universality of certain values and beliefs, which we all are required to follow as global citizens.

Tourism as Commodifier

Another possible influence of tourism on globalization is the process of cultural commodification , which refers to the drive toward putting a monetary value on every aspect of culture, from buying a sculpture stolen from an ancient temple, to buying endangered objects such as ivory and coral, or buying a T-shirt that desecrates a symbol or object important to another culture. This trend results in the degradation or devaluing of cultural values and beliefs and was explored in Chapter 12 on Indigenous tourism.

As one of the world’s largest industries, tourism impacts local, regional, and global economies. Resorts dot coastlines around the world and offer a welcome respite from colder climates to anyone wishing to experience a tropical beach, as well as the local culture and nature. While benefit comes to the community in the form of jobs, more often than not the larger share of the wealth leaks offshore. In response, local entrepreneurs and aid organizations have helped with initiatives that embrace local ownership in order for the wealth generated from tourism to stay in country . Community-based tourism, responsible tourism, and social entrepreneurship all aim to bring greater benefit to local communities.

Tourism As a World View

Tourism is also a major influence in how we see and understand the world. Keith Hollinshead (2019) refers to it as tourism world-making , or the way in which a place or culture is marketed and/or presented to tourists. Unlike local people, travellers experience a place for a few days, with limited knowledge of the culture and local way of life. Some visitors rely on available tourist information to make the most of the experience and to see the highlights. Others turn away and attempt to “go local” in search of the authentic experience with the belief that they can truly understand a place by avoiding the tourist sites.

If tourists stay in their resort in a given country, their only interaction with a local culture may be the staff at the hotel. In many cases, visitors experience a place in a fragmented, disconnected way, seeing only a portion of a place. How much can be gained from such short and transient experiences? This debate leads to one of the often discussed, if not hotly debated, topics in tourism, that of authenticity of experience . In 1976, Dean MacCannell released his book  The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class , in which he argued that even those events that seem to be authentic are in some way staged for the visitor.

Take a Closer Look: Cannibal Tours

In 1988, Dean O’Rourke shot a documentary profiling the experiences of jet-set travellers as they encountered locals in Papua New Guinea. The movie highlights the challenges that happen when visitors meet with “the other,” in that their expectations shape the behaviours of the locals. The movie features interviews with the locals as well as tourists. Watch the movie Cannibal Tours .

As a quick review before leaving here, drag the following factors to the correct description between globalization and tourism.

Now let’s look at some predominant trends in the industry.

An acronym for political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental forces.

The movement of goods, ideas, values, and people around the world.

Making the same, i.e., the effect of tourism helping to spread Western values, rendering one culture indistinguishable from the next.

The drive toward putting a monetary value on aspects of a culture.

A term to describe using a local-ownership approach in order for the wealth generated from tourism to stay in a destination.

The way in which a place or culture is marketed and/or presented to tourists.

A hot topic in tourism that started with MacCannell in 1976 and continues to today; discussion of the extent to which experiences are staged for visitors.

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Tourism has massively increased in recent decades. Aviation has opened up travel from domestic to international. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of international visits had more than doubled since 2000.

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For visitors, traveling can increase their understanding of and appreciation for people in other countries and their cultures.

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But tourism also has externalities: it contributes to global carbon emissions and can encroach on local environments and cultures.

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A ten-year review analysis of the impact of digitization on tourism development (2012–2022)

• Chunyu Jiang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6072-8365 1 &
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Many tourism-related activities have been suspended due to the nationally enforced lockdown to combat the Coronavirus pandemic. The tourism industry suffered immensely from the lockdown, and as a result of this, digital tourism began gaining traction and attracted public attention. This study analyses the impact of digitalization on the social and economic sustainability of the tourism industry via systematic literature network analysis. The findings indicated that digitalization impacts economic sustainability, encompassing economic benefits in tourism product development, tourism consumption, and industrial development. Moreover, digitalization fosters social development, cultural awareness, and tourism participation in digital technology and cultural heritage. This study identified publication trends and research hotspots using bibliometric analysis, and it was confirmed that Sustainability was the top journal in published digital and tourism sustainability-related articles, followed by the International Journal of Tourism Research, Tourism Management , and Current Issues in Tourism . This study resulted in two implications: identifying the knowledge gap and evidence-based decision-making based on the (previous) literature. Recommendation for future research is also discussed in this study, which is helpful to policymakers, tourism planners, and researchers to develop strategies grounded in research.

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Introduction.

From 2019 through 2022, the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) wreaked havoc on the world’s tourism business (Navarro-Drazich and Lorenzo, 2021 ). Tourism contributes to many nations’ gross domestic product (GDP) as it is intertwined with various industries (Gössling et al., 2017 ). Examples of tourism products include lodging options such as hotels and Airbnb. Food and drink, theme parks, museum visits, and fashion items such as clothes and bags are additional examples of tourism products that boost the economic health of the individual and the nation.

Tourism is regarded as a complex service-driven industry, one of the characteristics of which is that if external influences disrupt the tourism sector, other industries linked to it will also be directly affected. Tourism development refers to creating and maintaining the tourism industry in a particular location and is closely linked to economic and social progress (Telfer and Sharpley, 2015 ). Over the past four decades, global tourism development has reported intense growth performance and research on tourism development (Capocchi et al., 2019 ). Kreishan ( 2010 ) posited that the impact of tourism development on destination development is a commonly discussed issue, particularly in terms of tourism development improving economic efficiency and local competitiveness. The growth of tourism currently is significant not only from an economic perspective but also from a social perspective, as evidenced by the optimization of the local social structure (Yang et al., 2021 ), increased community participation (W. Li, 2006 ), participation of women (Ferguson, 2011 ), and increased cultural awareness (Carbone, 2017 ). Also, the development of the tourism industry benefits the environment by increasing environmental protection awareness and providing greater funding for initiatives to conserve resources and the environment (Zhao and Li, 2018 ).

However, unmanaged over-tourism can cause serious harm, according to Berselli et al. ( 2022 ). From an economic standpoint, excessive tourism can result in higher prices and imbalanced industrial structure development, which lowers industries’ overall resilience. Social issues arising from over-tourism include the commercialization of culture (Wang et al., 2019 ), the shift in locals’ attitudes from friendliness to hostility towards tourists (Kim and Kang, 2020 ), and the emergence of on-stage authenticity (Taylor, 2001 ). In terms of the environment, issues such as excessive carbon emissions causing global warming (Liu et al., 2022 ), damage to water and soil resources, destruction to flora and fauna (Gössling and Hall, 2006 ), and even harm to cultural heritage (Zhang et al., 2015 ) are some of the effects of over-tourism. Since the development of the tourism industry combines economic, social, and cultural phenomena, as well as the past COVID-19 disruptions, the industry’s suspension for several years presents a significant opportunity for all stakeholders to reposition tourism for sustainable development.

Some studies suggest the tourism industry will recover after COVID-19 (Zhong et al., 2021 ). However, given the abovementioned problems caused by over-tourism, what needs to be considered is the sustainability of the tourism industry post-COVID-19. Researchers and tourism stakeholders are becoming more aware of the importance of the concept of sustainable development (Miceli et al., 2021 ), especially since COVID-19, as the tourism or hospitality industry remains one of the least developed sectors in terms of sustainable tourism practices (Kim and Park, 2017 ). Korstanje and George ( 2020 ) noted that over-tourism is a chronic disease that mere temporary changes cannot treat; it can be minimized via education and training to raise awareness. The tourism industry needs to rethink how to develop in a sustainable and healthy direction (Higgins-Desbiolles et al., 2019 ), not only in terms of ecotourism or green tourism but also in terms of putting the concept of sustainability into practice at a deeper level as it faces multiple pressures and challenges of an overarching environment, economy, and society.

Sustainability is often cited as one of the reasons for improved competitiveness among different tourism destinations (Han et al., 2019 ). The United Nations 2030 (UN, 2030 ) Agenda for Sustainable Development has developed a Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) plan, defined as a set of global goals for fair and sustainable health at every level, from the planetary biosphere to the local community. The aim is to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that everyone enjoys peace and prosperity now and in the future. The basic concept is that productivity can be preserved for future generations. Due to the general emphasis of the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) on sustainable tourism and the industry’s economic importance, the SDGs and its associated millennium development goals (MDGs) have become critical elements for research into tourism’s contribution to sustainable development and overall sustainability (Saarinen et al., 2011 ; Saarinen and Rogerson, 2014 ). Winter et al. ( 2020 ) indicated that as sustainable tourism development needs to take complete account of the combined social, economic, and environmental impacts, stakeholders are expected to integrate scientific management and practice for future sustainability using updated and innovative technologies that can provide more tourism opportunities for groups unable to travel directly while enhancing environmentally-friendly behavior. Bramwell and Lane ( 2011 ) suggested that effective policy support is also crucial to implementing sustainable tourism development, as the path to sustainable development is guided and monitored by excellent and progressive policies. From a postmodernist perspective, social media and place brand authenticity in smart tourism are essential to place trust, place identity, and place brand image, while the development of this brand authenticity is one of the critical indicators of the visitor experience (Handayani and Korstanje, 2017 ). As a result, Korstanje et al. ( 2022 ) contended that new paradigms and strategies must be created to confront risks to tourism in the 21st century and satisfy the SDGs by 2030.

Several studies are underway to determine the impact of various programs and strategies on the environmental component of sustainability practices (Goralski and Tan, 2020 ). Yalina and Rozas ( 2020 ) suggested that a digital workplace can promote environmental sustainability. Although there have been studies on the digitalization of tourism and environmental sustainability, such as Loureiro and Nascimento ( 2021 ), who reviewed digital technology on the sustainability of tourism using bibliometric methods, there is a need for a thorough examination of the impact of digital transformation on sustainable tourism growth, particularly in terms of economic and social dimensions (Feroz et al., 2021 ). Therefore, the objective of this study is to review the impact of tourism digital technology development on the economic and social sustainability of tourism development to offer future research guidance.

With the growing literature and the emergence of cross-disciplinary research related to sustainability and digitalization in tourism development, it is critical to analyze the changes in its research, summarize the focus of previous research content, and predict future research prospects. As a result, this study will address the above research gaps by answering the following three questions.

RQ1: What are the prominent documents, authors, sources, organizations, and keywords in digitalization for the economic and social sustainability of tourism development?

RQ2: What are the linkages based on bibliographic coupling, co-authorship, co-occurrence, and citation in digitalization for the economic and social sustainability of tourism development?

RQ3: What is the future research agenda based on the results of this study?

Literature review

Several review papers on tourism research are now available and relevant to this study. Ülker et al. ( 2023 ) assumed that there are currently 136 bibliometric studies in the tourism and hospitality industry, of which the literature review studies on overall trends in the tourism and hospitality industry are continuously being updated (Chang and Katrichis, 2016 ; Wang et al., 2023 ). Also, economic development in the tourism industry (Comerio and Strozzi, 2019 ), tourism marketing (Mwinuka, 2017 ), tourism and education (Goh and King, 2020 ), hospitality (Manoharan and Singal, 2017 ), Airbnb (Andreu et al., 2020 ), and even COVID-19 review articles related to tourism development are available (Bhatia et al., 2022 ).

With the emergence of cross-disciplinary digital-related technologies, the link between tourism and digitalization has become one of the hot topics of research, and as a result, several literature review articles on digitalization and tourism have been published, such as on robotics (Buhalis and Cheng, 2020 ; Ivanov et al., 2019 ; Pizam et al., 2022 ), ICT (Buhalis and Law, 2008 ; Law et al., 2014 ), big data (Li et al., 2018 ; Stylos et al., 2021 ), smart tourism (Buhalis, 2020 ; Mehraliyev et al., 2020 ), social media (Buhalis and Inversini, 2014 ; Mirzaalian and Halpenny, 2019 ), eye-tracking (Muñoz-Leiva et al., 2019 ; Scott et al., 2019 ), AI (Buhalis and Moldavska, 2022 ; Doborjeh et al., 2022 ; Dwivedi et al., 2023 ), VR (Koohang et al., 2023 ; Wei, 2019 ), AR (Jingen Liang and Elliot, 2021 ; Tscheu and Buhalis, 2016 ; Yovcheva et al., 2012 ), MR (Buhalis and Karatay, 2022 ), and the Metaverse (Ahuja et al., 2023 ; Buhalis et al., 2022 , 2023 ; Go and Kang, 2023 ).

Due to the rise of sustainability research, the literature review on sustainability research in tourism has seen a stark increase (León-Gómez et al., 2021 ; Ruhanen et al., 2018 ; Streimikiene et al., 2021 ). The proliferation of studies related to digitalization and sustainable tourism development has led to a considerable number of review articles (Elkhwesky et al., 2022 ; Gössling, 2017 ; Loureiro and Nascimento, 2021 ; Nascimento and Loureiro, 2022 ; Rahmadian et al., 2022 ). Feroz et al. ( 2021 ) conducted a literature study on the environmental aspects of tourism sustainability and digitalization; however, there is a distinct lack of studies on the economic and social dimensions.

Therefore, the study’s unique value is that it presents the first literature review in the field of digitalization and social and tourism economic sustainability development using a novel method of systematic literature network analysis (SLNA), filling a gap in the literature review landscape and addressing the need for more comprehensive, detailed, and up-to-date research endeavor.

Methodology

Colicchia and Strozzi ( 2012 ) proposed a systematic literature review analysis (SLNA) to identify past research trends more sophisticatedly, integrated, and scientifically. This method is currently used in reviews of sustainable development research (Afeltra et al., 2021 ) but is rarely used in reviews of tourism sustainability; therefore, SLNA is used in this study.

Systematic literature review (SLR) and bibliographic network analysis (BNA) are the two phases of SLNA. These actions comprise the first phase of SLR, which includes choosing the study’s final selection, conducting a dialectical examination of the most pertinent articles, and evaluating the results. Next, citation analysis and bibliographic coupling of BNA are also included in this paper to investigate the relationship between the previous literature, assess the research trends, and aid in uncovering future research innovation opportunities. Bibliographic coupling is a scientific mapping technique regarding two articles with a common citation contentedly comparable. This technique permits the segmentation of publications into thematic clusters utilizing published references to understand the most recent developments in current research issues (Donthu et al., 2021 ). Citation analysis reveals which papers are influential and their authors and journals and aids in comprehending what past literature has contributed (Pilkington and Meredith, 2009 ).

First phase: systematic literature review (SLR)

Introduction of slr.

The most widely used and reputable databases are the Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus (Garrigos-Simon et al., 2018 ); thus, both were used in this study to eliminate data search omissions, broaden the search scope, and improve the accuracy of data outputs.

Figure 1 shows the flow diagram for systematic bibliometric analysis. Firstly, this paper takes “virtual reality or augmented reality or artificial intelligence or big data or mobile technology or internet of technology or social platform technology) and (sustainable tourism development or sustainability of tourism or green tourism or ecotourism” as keywords. The search process began by searching topics (including article titles, abstracts, and keywords). The language of the articles was set to English and had to be published between 2012 and 2022. The search process resulted in 91 articles. The data were extracted on February 15, 2022, per Fig. 2 .

This figure shows the overall process of this study from database selection until suggestions for future research. Source: Own elaboration.

The criteria and steps used to identify the selected target literature are explained in this diagram. Source: Own elaboration.

A review article with scholarly worth and contribution is required to describe the literature’s links and contents and examine and critique it precisely (Hart, 2018 ). As seen in Fig. 3 , the following research topics are divided into two categories: economic sustainability (which includes topics such as economic benefit, industry development, and tourist consumption) and social sustainability (which includes topics such as tourist behavior, social development, cultural awareness, and participation).

The research topics are divided into two categories: economic sustainability (which includes topics such as economic benefit, industry development, and tourist consumption) and social sustainability (which includes topics such as tourist behavior, social development, cultural awareness, and participation. Source: Own elaboration.

The SLRs are used to locate, appraise, and synthesize existing, completed, and documented work (Cocchia, 2014 ), facilitating classification and summarization, particularly for micro-profiling within macro-level fields of study.

Digitalization’s impact on economic sustainability

Digitalization’s impact on economic benefits.

Adequately improving the economic development of tourism is also one of the sustainable needs for developing tourism. At a time when tourism has been devastated by COVID-19, the tourism industry has almost ceased to exist. Therefore, one of the most popular research topics is maintaining substantial economic benefits while allowing the tourism industry to flourish sustainably.

Digital technology has piqued researchers’ interest due to its potential benefit to the tourism industry. Technologies that directly improve the economic situation are classed as economic benefits, and per many studies, digitization positively impacts local economic development and may bring objective revenue to tourism (Tables 1 – 7 ).

Digital technology promotes economic development. The growth of information communication technologies (ICT) positively impacts China’s tourism industry while promoting economic growth (Shehzad et al., 2019 ). As a rapidly evolving digital technology, mobile technology has significantly minimized asymmetric information, enhanced local GDP growth, and increased citizens’ financial capital through tourism (Kim and Kim, 2017 ; Phoong et al., 2022 ). Technologies such as 3D virtual, mixed reality (MR), virtual reality (VR), or augmented reality (AR) applied in heritage tourism can effectively increase local economic income and the added value of tourism (Manglis et al., 2021 ; Martinez-Grana et al., 2019 ). Furthermore, marketing tools such as small programs and network technologies confer several advantages to tourism stakeholders, such as the ability to help local communities contribute value and support the tourism economy (Caciora et al., 2021 ; Lin et al., 2020a , b ). Also, smart heritage city tourism technology tools can drive the tourism economy to inaccessible areas (Gomez-Oliva et al., 2019 ).

The increase in income is proportional to increased economic benefits. ICT is often used in the tourism industry, which has an essential impact on the tourism service industry, one of which is the improvement of tourism income (Gomez-Oliva et al., 2019 ; Koukopoulos and Koukopoulos, 2019 ). Virtual tourism technologies, such as AR and VR, are digital tools that can help overcome cultural heritage tourism challenges, such as reviving the tourism industry and resolving funding shortages (Lu et al., 2022 ). Mobile money, such as electronic traveler’s checks and credit cards, can assist low-income people in taking advantage of their marginal savings and encourage implementing a cashless economy for tourism sustainability (Singh, 2017 ).

Second, digital marketing technologies are frequently utilized by hotels to improve hotel performance, which increases profit (Theocharidis et al., 2020 ; Vitezic et al., 2015 ). Another example is Muslim-friendly apps promoting the international trade of products during the tourism process (Cuesta-Valiño et al., 2020 ),

Digitalization’s impact on tourism industrial development

Technological development has driven the tourism industry in local tourist cities, organizations, businesses, and governments. From the perspective of industrial market development, ICT, extensive data network marketing, and other virtual tourism technologies can create market development potential and improve market positioning for companies (Ammirato et al., 2021 ; Filipiak et al., 2020 ; Ma et al., 2021 ).

Adopting and applying information in the tourism industry are commonly regarded as a source of corporate innovation. The implementation of ICT can increase the profitability of tourism enterprises while also increasing organizational productivity (Croitoru and Manoliu, 2016 ; De Lucia et al., 2021 ; Duy et al., 2020 ; Obonyo et al., 2018 ). VR, AR, 3D digital technology, and mobile technology can all be used to improve a company’s performance and competitiveness in the tourism industry (Cranmer et al., 2021 ; Koukopoulos and Koukopoulos, 2018 ; Pavlidis et al., 2022 ; Yuce et al., 2020 ), and these technologies have made significant economic contribution to economic sustainability.

The application and implementation of ICT play an essential role in developing the tourism industry (Adeola and Evans, 2020 ; Tan et al., 2019 ; Zhou and Sotiriadis, 2021 ). Also, digital advanced technologies, such as MR technology adopted by museums, AR technology adopted by destinations, and smart tourism products and tourism ecological reservation systems have made significant contributions in the front-end development stage, providing opportunities to monitor the future development of tourism, as well as being beneficial to the formulation and implementation of tourism industry strategies at later stages (Graziano and Privitera, 2020 ; Tsai et al., 2018 ). The abovementioned electronic environment is an excellent lubricant for tourism’s active and healthy development (Maiorescu et al., 2016 ). Moreover, apps can help customers understand legacy cities more from the standpoint of heritage preservation and help cities promote tourist city development (Briciu et al., 2020 ).

From the perspective of products sold and variations in product types, online services in Muslim-friendly apps can be helpful for market segmentation and promotion of product positioning and sales (Cuesta-Valiño et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, virtual multi-sensory technologies can improve the company’s potential, increase public awareness, and sell products (Martins et al., 2017 ). Undeniably, the development of digitalization enriches the cultural service products of museums in developing heritage tourism (Palumbo, 2021 ), and AR technology also increases the diversification of products in water tourism (Kaźmierczak et al., 2021 ).

Digitalization’s impact on tourism consumption

Tourists’ spending power can reflect the overall economic development of the tourism industry as one of the contributing variables, and the number of tourists and the value of tourist flow are two measurement criteria of tourism consumer spending. Tourism apps, for example, can make traveling more convenient for tourists, increasing tourism consumption (Lin et al., 2020a , b ). Virtual tourism products or augmented reality technology allow tourists to spend more leisure time, increasing consumption (da Silva, 2021 ; Pehlivanides et al., 2020 ).

The application of virtual tourism technology is also helpful in improving the attractiveness of tourists (Cai et al., 2021 ; Manglis et al., 2021 ; Martins et al., 2017 ). Meanwhile, big data analytic tools, e-marketing (WOM), and mobile applications positively influence customers’ intention to travel and contribute to improving tourism sustainability (Gajdosik, 2019 ; Kim and Chang, 2020 ; Pica et al., 2018 ). With the application and construction of ICT, the demand for tourism has increased, and the number of tourists has also increased (Adeola and Evans, 2020 ; Kabassi, 2017 ; Kumar and Kumar, 2020 ). In addition to enhancing tourists’ imagination, virtual tourism technology and 3D digital technology can also be used as practical tools to further develop tourism and increase the number and flow of tourists (Bae et al., 2020 ; Graziano and Privitera, 2020 ; Pavlidis et al., 2022 ). Word-of-mouth marketing has increased the number of tourists (Fernandez-Lores et al., 2022 ; Wang et al., 2020 ).

Digitalization’s impact on social sustainability

Digitalization’s impact on tourist behavior.

Virtual tourism technology is gradually being implemented in the tourism industry, focusing on increasing the satisfaction of the elderly and disabled (Lu et al., 2022 ). Artificial intelligence and virtual reality are integrated into human-computer interaction system equipment, boosting service quality and increasing tourist satisfaction (Van et al., 2020 ). The mixed experience helps enrich tourists’ feelings about the surroundings, thereby boosting tourists’ contentment (Bae et al., 2020 ), and the succinct information and dependable system offered by VR can promote tourists’ satisfaction (Yuce et al., 2020 ). 3D digital technology to build innovative and appealing tourism items can help boost consumer satisfaction and positive feedback (Pavlidis et al., 2022 ).

Tourism stakeholders’ use of tourism apps is critical to increasing tourist satisfaction (Lin et al., 2020a , b ). For example, tourism management in Ho Chi Minh City’s use of Web 4.0 can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty in the long run (Duy et al., 2020 ). The mobile usability and ease of use of social media as a suitable medium directly impact satisfaction (Sharmin et al., 2021 ). It can also serve as a platform for tourists to communicate and contribute to increased satisfaction (Jamshidi et al., 2021 ). Simultaneously, tourism safety is an essential factor that influences tourist satisfaction, and the use of closed-circuit television (CCTV) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can help to improve tourism safety (Ko and Song, 2021 ). The use of mobile technologies and payment mechanisms in the tourism process is also a fascinating study. Through electronic technology, two-dimensional code payment techniques improve tourists’ pleasure (Lou et al., 2017 ). Furthermore, incorporating digital innovation into hotel management structures increases hotel performance and client satisfaction (Vitezic et al., 2015 ).

Tourism satisfaction is directly related to tourism experience, and tourism experience is one of the most important criteria to measure in the tourism process. The findings suggest that using virtual immersion technologies such as AR, VR, and MR in the tourism process can significantly improve the tourist experience (Bae et al., 2020 ; Fernandez-Lores et al., 2022 ; Franco and Mota, 2021 ; Lee and Kim, 2021 ; Yin et al., 2021 ).

Additionally, the intention and motivation of tourism drive tourism behavior from the psychological aspect. Digital innovative technology can boost tourists’ interest in tourism products and locations, enrich their understanding of tourism culture, attract more tourists, enhance tourists’ preferences, and strengthen their desire to visit (Caciora et al., 2021 ; Cranmer et al., 2021 ; Gajdosik, 2019 ; Kang, 2020 ; Kaźmierczak et al., 2021 ; Manglis et al., 2021 ; Monterroso-Checa et al., 2020 ;). Digital marketing tools can ramp up customers’ desires and habits (Theocharidis et al., 2020 ), and digital mobile programs can increase tourists’ attention, influencing their overall view of the tourism experience (Wang et al., 2020 ). Big data can also be utilized to foresee client wants and expectations, allowing for a better understanding of customer needs (Del Vecchio et al., 2018 ). For example, Internet of Things technology can scientifically guide and divert tourists to alleviate the problem of local saturation and overload in scenic sites, thus improving the tourist experience (Xie and Zhang, 2021 ). It can also provide various cultural tourism content to enhance and support the experience of active tourists (Ammirato et al., 2021 ).

Digitalization’s impact on social development

Tourism planners and governments can use the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and geographic information system-remote sensing (GIS-RS) technology to accurately select sites, develop eco-tourism activities, relieve the burden of tourism in the region, and thus help the locals create new employment opportunities (Chaudhary et al., n.d. ). Virtual tourism technology, such as AR, can also aid in analyzing tourist flow and conditions, improve safety, and expand job chances (Franco and Mota, 2021 ). Advances and innovations in tourism ICT can benefit enterprises enough to increase job prospects (De Lucia et al., 2021 ). Virtual tourism, ICT, mobile technology, smart heritage tourism technology, and innovative marketing methods improve stakeholders’ quality of life, increasing the tourism system and community awareness (Lemmi and Deri, 2020 ).

Digitalization’s impact on cultural awareness

Virtual technologies, such as AR, VR, and mobile augmented reality (MAR), are now widely used in cultural heritage tourism, with the potential to protect cultural heritages and enhance the potential of heritage management, thereby contributing to cultural communication (Bec et al., 2019 ; Caciora et al., 2021 ; Graziano and Privitera, 2020 ). Some studies indicate that online engagement platforms, mobile application technologies, and smart tourism models can all support the socially sustainable growth of culture (Bonacini et al., 2018 ; Pica et al., 2018 ; Zubiaga et al., 2019 ).

AR, VR, and other techniques can promote tourists’ behavior in underwater cultural tourism and raise public awareness of natural heritage protection among tourists (Manglis et al., 2021 ). Research on low-carbon travel modes is frequently concerned with tourism sustainability, and big data marketing technology can supply tourists with more low-carbon transport schemes, thus increasing tourists’ environmental consciousness (Ma et al., 2021 ). As a common medium for cultural communication, social media can raise tourists’ awareness of environmental protection (Haque et al., 2021 ).

Digitalization’s impact on participation

Tourists’ active participation in cultural heritage can be enhanced by digital technology, as can people’s feeling of belonging and responsibility to society (Koukopoulos and Koukopoulos, 2019 ; Permatasari et al., 2020 ). Virtual technology can also encourage public participation in preserving and promoting cultural heritages (Caciora et al., 2021 ), while digital media can help tourism businesses improve public relations and social participation (Camilleri, 2018 ; Haque et al., 2021 ). Increased smart tourism destinations optimize the potential for these communities to involve the destinations’ residents and impact their lives due to the improved urban tourism experience.

Stakeholders are closely linked to the sustainable development of tourism. Innovative applications of digital technology can better manage destination stakeholders, strengthening their linkages (Camilleri, 2018 ), help promote their participation in the development of tourist destinations (del Vecchio et al., n.d. ; Gajdosik, 2019 ), and create a democratic and sustainable system when promoting cultural heritage, which balances the opinions of different stakeholders.

The interactive network platform empowers local communities and encourages local inhabitants and tourists to communicate, which promotes the healthy growth of resident-tourism relationships (Dionisio et al., 2019 ). Also, ICT tourism apps influence the ultimate perception of older tourists’ travel experiences, stimulate tourists’ interest in world cultural heritage sites (WCHS), and increase contact and understanding between tourists and destinations (Ramos-Soler et al., 2019 ). Social media can help tourists increase their knowledge of environmental protection, which increases the participation of tourists and citizens and helps formulate sustainable goals (Haque et al., 2021 ).

Second phase: bibliographic network analysis (BNA)

The VOSviewer is the analysis tool used in this work to visualize the impact of digital technology on sustainable tourism development in economic and social aspects. VOSviewer employs the visualization of similarities (VOS) mapping approach to create a map (Moya‐Anegón et al., 2007 ).

Bibliographic coupling network of sources

Bibliographic coupling analysis mainly measures the similarity of documents by the number of identical references cited by documents. Although co-citation refers to the appearance of two documents in the same reference list, bibliographic coupling refers to the number of references that a group of papers share; for example, paper A and paper B are coupled if they both cite document C (Garrigos-Simon et al., 2018 ). In other words, bibliographic coupling happens when two documents quote the same document (Phoong et al., 2022 ; Mulet-Forteza et al., 2018 ), demonstrating the power of one publication in comparison to a group of others (Cavalcante et al., 2021 ). It should be pointed out that the size of the sphere represents the number of similar citations. This paper analyzes the bibliographic coupling network of sources, and the findings are summarized in Fig. 4 . Per Fig. 4 , there are 9 clusters, and the journal source with the highest number of similar citations is Sustainability . It can, therefore, be concluded that this journal has the most citations and published articles on this subject.

This figure refers to the number of references shared by a group of papers. Source: Own elaboration.

Citation network of documents

Citations are formed when two documents cite the same document and are used to illustrate the relation between documents and study fields. Figure 5 shows four clusters, each representing the degree of connection and the extent of influence in size. This study has the highest influence, according to the largest green group. It offers insight into the impact of reality and virtual reality on heritage tourism, stating that these technologies favorably impact tourists’ experiences (Bec et al., 2019 ).

Cluster size indicates the degree of connection and influence of the literature and research area. There are four groups, with the blue (Encalada et al., 2017 ) and green (Bec et al., 2019 ) groups representing the two articles that are relatively most influential. Source: Own elaboration.

This Blue Group study is also prominent, proposing that the widespread use of information and communication technologies, such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and data mining with high processing performance, are the key to tourism’s sustainability (Encalada et al., 2017 ).

The number of citations between documents is used in co-citation analysis to determine their relevance. Figure 6 shows which publications are cited most frequently, and it is clear that tourism management and sustainability are the two commanding the most attention. Generally, the closer two journals are located to each other, the stronger their relatedness. For example, according to an article published in Tourism Management , virtual reality has significantly increased tourism intention and consumption (Tussyadiah et al., 2018 ). Simultaneously, this article presents the finding, which illustrates that combining history with cutting-edge technology in immersive spaces can preserve and manage legacy and enrich the visitor experience and, as a result, engagement with history (Bec et al., 2019 ).

This figure represents the citation strength of publications. The circle distance represents relevance. Source: Own elaboration.

Co-occurrence network of Keywords and titles

The significance of keyword co-occurrence analysis in bibliometrics resides in an intuitive understanding of hot subjects in the study field through the frequency and relevance of terms (Phoong et al., 2022 ). Before that, the following considerations must be made.

To begin, each node in the network map indicates a keyword, and the size of the ball represents the number of keywords that appear. The larger the ball, for example, indicates the higher frequency of keywords occurring. Second, the larger the co-occurrence rate between terms, the thicker the curve between the second keywords. In the third, on the network map, different color groups reflect different theme collections, while the same color represents similar subjects (Loureiro and Nascimento, 2021 ).

Figures 7 and 8 illustrate overlay visualization (Fig. 8 ) and network visualization (Fig. 7 ). From Fig. 7 , the keywords of high frequency include tourism (37 occurrences), technology (35 occurrences), tourist (32 occurrences), experience (31 occurrences), information (25 occurrences), application (23 occurrences), data (22 occurrences), analysis (21 occurrences), impact (21 occurrences), sustainability (14 occurrences) and sustainable development (9 occurrences). Some of Red Network Group’s primary keywords are tourism, information, impact, communication technology, virtual reality, new technology, and cultural tourism. The study’s content focuses on the impact of the relationship between information technology and tourism. Yellow Network Group’s primary keywords are destination, tourism destination, environment, and AR, mainly concentrated on destination environment and AR application research. The green network group comprises tourists, analysis, process, big data, management, stakeholders, case studies, innovation, and other topics. This group has conducted more studies on the effect of digital technology on enterprise management from stakeholders’ perspectives. The Blue Network Group focuses on technology, experience, data, service, research, relationships, social media, sustainable development, tourist satisfaction, intention, and other related topics, and this group study is particularly interested in the influence of technology on tourist experience and satisfaction.

The same color indicates a close relationship between the keywords. The red network group focuses on tourism and information technology, the yellow network group concentrates on destinations and the environment, and the blue group emphasizes tourists and technology, the green group concerns tourists and analyses. Source: Own elaboration.

Darker colors indicate older keywords such as tourists, information, data, research, etc. and lighter colors show the recent hot keywords such as big data, AR, VR, sustainable development, etc. Source: Own elaboration.

After conducting a literature review on digital technology’s economic and social implications on sustainable tourism development over the last ten years and creating a density visualization network map, it can be concluded that tourist experience, information technology, augmented reality, and data are research hotspots. As a result, most studies on tourism sustainability in social and economic dimensions focus on the impact of digital technology on the tourist experience.

Even though they are all co-occurrence analyses of keywords in literature, the emphasis in each network map is different. Generally, overlay visualization and network visualization are comparable to a certain extent; however, the color differs in overlay visualization (Fig. 8 ). In the lower right corner, there is also a quantification table. Purple indicates that the keywords are older, while yellow indicates that they are more modern. For example, keywords such as big data, augmented reality, sustainable development, creation, and intention are yellow, indicating a recent research hotspot, but keywords such as communication technology, information, environment, and service are purple, indicating that these themes were formerly popular.

Results and discussion

The data were collected from 2012 until February 2022. Analysis of the published articles shows a significant increase in publications on digitalization and tourism sustainability development. In 2017, seven articles were published, 10 in 2018, 16 in 2019, and 23 in 2020 and 2021. Furthermore, there are 6 published in the first two months of 2022. These findings illustrate a rise in data availability for digitalization and sustainable tourism development research and suggest that researchers are considering this topic more seriously, demonstrating its value to academic research.

According to the findings, Sustainability was the top journal in published digital and tourism sustainability-related articles. This is followed by the International Journal of Tourism Research , Tourism Management , and Current Issues in Tourism . The number of publications on the relevant subject has increased steadily, particularly in recent years, indicating that this form of research is increasingly gaining attention. Research over the last decade has shown the existence of a certain number of empirical studies on the relationship between digitalization and tourism social and economic sustainability, and from the bibliometric analysis, it emerges that the current research direction on tourism social and economic sustainability has shifted from exploring ICT to AR and VR. Moreover, Tourism Management and Sustainability have the highest citation.

In summary, this study answers RQ1 using the bibliometric literature analysis, while a systematic literature review used to answer RQ2 and RQ3 is discussed in the conclusion and further recommendation sections.

The content of relevant articles published in WOS and Scopus in this research area over the last decade was visually analyzed through bibliometric and systematic literature analysis, and a total of 91 articles meeting the research criteria were selected to provide information on the status of the impact of digitalization on the social and economic aspects of sustainable tourism development, as well as to identify specific research fields and research topics. It can be concluded that the digitalization of the social dimension of tourism sustainability is more richly studied and explored from a more diverse perspective, considering not only the tourists’ but also the residents’ perspectives. There are two implications in the present study. The first is that this study pinpointed the knowledge gaps. Systematic literature review analysis is used in this study to identify the gaps in the existing body of research in tourism development. By reviewing the previous literature and synthesizing the findings, researchers can identify the areas receiving limited or much attention. This insight is valuable for policymakers, tourism planners, and researchers when dealing with specific areas where future research is warranted. Furthermore, the publication trend and popular research themes were also discussed in this study. This enables the policymaker and tourism planner to understand tourism development and the potential for improved policies and practices. The second implication is enabling evidence-based decision-making in tourism development. Researchers can identify patterns, trends, and best practices by synthesizing the findings from multiple studies. This evidence-based approach helps policymakers, destination managers, and tourism stakeholders make informed decisions and develop strategies grounded in research. However, there is a lack of a more comprehensive perspective to explore in an integrated manner. For example, social and economic sustainability development sometimes does not increase simultaneously, and perhaps there is a particular imbalance between the two when using certain digital technologies. Therefore, it can be observed from this study that there is a lack of research in the past ten years that has explored both the economic and social sustainability of tourism comprehensively and that future research could emphasize the integration of social and economic sustainability, even a synthesis study of three dimensions: environmental social, and economic.

Therefore, when considering future developments, several challenges were raised.

Lack of integration study of social and economic dimensions.

Lack of cooperative research among other disciplines.

Lack of suitable theory and conceptual model for sustainable development research in the tourism area.

Lack of universality in different regions based on proposed digital technology.

Lack of research from the perspective of subject education or particular population as the research object.

Based on this literature study, relatively few research topics about this research area are suggested, and the following research scope and questions can be referred to as a priority in the future research process so that research trends can be accurately grasped more quickly and efficiently.

What is the impact of digital technologies on the economic and social sustainability of destinations?

How do digital technologies used in cultural heritage tourism impact tourism sustainability?

What is the impact of digital technology on education?

How can tourism companies improve employee satisfaction, loyalty, and sustainable performance through digital technology?

How can we create a globally accessible and digital system for tourism destinations for sustainable development goals?

How does digitalization impact sustainable development from stakeholders’ perspectives?

The above suggestions and research direction recommendations can provide new research inspiration to researchers in the same field for future research, and this study is expected to help other researchers understand the current research trends related to the digitalization of sustainable tourism development.

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Jiang, C., Phoong, S.W. A ten-year review analysis of the impact of digitization on tourism development (2012–2022). Humanit Soc Sci Commun 10 , 665 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02150-7

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Turning tourism into development: Mitigating risks and leveraging heritage assets

If done right, tourism can actually bolster and preserve cultural heritage, while also helping to develop economies. Image:  REUTERS/David Loh

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Stay up to date:, travel and tourism.

• Cultural and historical travel accounts for 40% of all tourism globally.
• 73% of millennials report being interested in cultural and historic places.
• Protecting local culture and heritage requires a robust plan to mitigate negative impacts and policies to ensure prosperity is shared.

Culture and heritage tourism has the potential to create significant employment opportunities and stimulate economic transformation.

However, communities worldwide often grapple with the challenges posed by the magnetic appeal of heritage sites and the promise of economic prosperity. Property values can increase, displacing local residents and permanently altering the character of their neighbourhoods.

But capitalizing on tourism's potential while preserving and enhancing history and culture is possible — and it is already being done in sites around the world. From Malaysia to Saudi Arabia, many are already demonstrating the ability to balance economic development with socially and environmentally sustainable transformations.

Below are five common features that those sustainable approaches embrace.

Have you read?

This is how to leverage community-led sustainable tourism for people and biodiversity, are we finally turning the tide towards sustainable tourism, how the middle east is striving to lead the way in sustainable tourism, translating a vision into an area-based plan.

Urban planning and regeneration require a holistic approach, coordinating interventions across various sectors and providing guidance for investments. A holistic plan would include spatial and policy measures that are supported by regulatory measures, particularly those focusing on affordability and social cohesion. UN-Habitat prioritizes measures which promote mixed-use and social-economically diverse development to mitigate gentrification.

In George Town, Malaysia, the Special Area Plan and its Comprehensive Management Plan function as the key reference for inclusive strategic policies, regulations and guidelines for conservation, economic activities and intangible heritage. The plan, which balances economic development and conservation, included affordability measures such as supporting local owners restoring their houses, enabling adaptive reuse for small businesses, and supporting renters, thus protecting a share of historic buildings from tourism-induced redevelopment.

In Saudi Arabia’s AlUla, home to 40,000 residents and leading cultural assets including Hegra and Jabal Ikma — which was recently added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register — a similar vision is unfolding. The Path to Prosperity masterplan makes provisions for new housing, creates new economic opportunities and establishes new schools, mosques and healthcare facilities for the community with affordability as the guiding principle. An expanded public realm will create district and neighbourhood parks with green spaces, playgrounds, outdoor gyms and bicycle trails. A network of scenic routes, low-impact public transportation and non-vehicular options will facilitate mobility.

A diversified economic base

To avoid over-reliance on a single economic driver, planners must make space for a range of alternative livelihoods. In AlUla, The Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), which is responsible for the city’s development into a tourism hub, is drawing on its rich local heritage to create a global destination while diversifying the local economy. Investment in native industries such as agriculture has resulted in a revived high-yielding and higher-value farming sector, while new sectors such as the creation of film and logistics industries are creating new jobs and providing increased revenue for residents.

The UN-Habitat Parya Sampada project in the Kathmandu Valley undertook earthquake reconstruction of the heritage settlements in urban areas using a holistic approach of physical reconstruction and economic recovery. It focused on the reconstruction of public heritage infrastructure supported by tourism enterprises run by women and youth.

Nurturing living heritage and local knowledge

Maintaining the character of a place is critical to its future and creates valuable economic assets. Maintenance and preservation animate the built environment, while the recovery of building techniques and crafts of traditional cultural activities creates jobs and maintains skills.

UN-Habitat’s work in Beirut demonstrates this approach, supporting several hundred jobs. Through the Beirut Housing Rehabilitation and Cultural and Creative Industries project, led by UN-Habitat, UNESCO supervises the allocation of small grants to local artisans. The regeneration of the historical train station in Mar Mikhael and adjacent areas will focus on traditional building techniques to reactivate cultural markets and businesses.

In AlUla, the Hammayah training programme is empowering thousands to work as guardians of natural heritage and culture. In Myanmar the nationwide Community-Based Tourism initiative is operated and managed by local vulnerable communities to provide genuine experiences to world travelers.

Share the value created by tourism

Addressing the negative externalities of tourism requires the assessment and compensation of its real impacts, which can be done through sustainable tourism planning and community participation. The pressure on services, increased congestion and the cost of living need to be addressed through specific investments, funded through the taxation of tourism-related revenues redirected towards the local community, especially for the most vulnerable groups.

Examples include the Balearic Island of Mallorca, which has introduced a sustainable tourism tax to support conservation of the island. Meanwhile Kyoto, Japan has implemented several measures to control the number of tourists at popular sites and establish visitor codes of conduct.

Human-centered local development

Empowering the local community to actively engage with its rich culture while minimizing conflict with the natural environment can increase the resilience of residents and reduce the pressures of gentrification. Participation in decision-making is critical to shape visions and plans that achieve these goals.

The UN-Habitat Participatory Strategy in Mexico’s San Nicolas de los Garza showcases how collaboration with the local community throughout the design and implementation process can ensure solutions capture the culture, skills and needs of the neighborhoods. The 2030 City Vision provides a participatory action plan for the integration of culture, heritage and tourism within the currently prevalent urban economic sectors.

In Saudi Arabia such approaches are embedded in Vision 2030, a blueprint for economic diversification. RCU deploys short- and long-term support to the community through scholarship, upskilling and support for SMEs to enhance access to jobs and entrepreneurship in hospitality and tourism.

While development always introduces complex dynamics and transformations, mitigating gentrification in tourist areas is crucial to achieving sustainable local development for the benefit of all and preserving the unique character of these places.

These measures advocate a proactive approach to ensure that economic growth remains inclusive for the entire community, and that tourism is promoted for the benefit of local residents as well as visitors.

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Research Article

Tourism research from its inception to present day: Subject area, geography, and gender distributions

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Writing – original draft

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation The Department of Tourism, Recreation and Sport Management, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft

• Andrei P. Kirilenko, 
• Svetlana Stepchenkova

• Published: November 2, 2018
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820
• Reader Comments

This paper uses text data mining to identify long-term developments in tourism academic research from the perspectives of thematic focus, geography, and gender of tourism authorship. Abstracts of papers published in the period of 1970–2017 in high-ranking tourist journals were extracted from the Scopus database and served as data source for the analysis. Fourteen subject areas were identified using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) text mining approach. LDA integrated with GIS information allowed to obtain geography distribution and trends of scholarly output, while probabilistic methods of gender identification based on social network data mining were used to track gender dynamics with sufficient confidence. The findings indicate that, while all 14 topics have been prominent from the inception of tourism studies to the present day, the geography of scholarship has notably expanded and the share of female authorship has increased through time and currently almost equals that of male authorship.

Citation: Kirilenko AP, Stepchenkova S (2018) Tourism research from its inception to present day: Subject area, geography, and gender distributions. PLoS ONE 13(11): e0206820. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820

Editor: Sergi Lozano, Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES), SPAIN

Received: July 27, 2018; Accepted: October 20, 2018; Published: November 2, 2018

Copyright: © 2018 Kirilenko, Stepchenkova. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files; the methodology for data acquisition is fully described in the manuscript.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1. Introduction

Recent years have evidenced an increased interest to tourism as a knowledge system [ 1 ] and to bibliometric analysis of tourism research output [ 2 – 6 ]. Systematic evaluation of scientific output in a particular field of study using bibliometrics (statistical analysis of publications) is usually conducted from one of three main perspectives: an individual author, an academic journal, and an academic field [ 7 ]. At the individual author level, authorship is examined in terms of academic leadership, productivity, and collaborative networks, using indicators such as the number of publications (e.g., [ 8 ]), impact (mainly through citation analysis, e.g., [ 9 ]), co-citations (e.g., [ 2 ]), and co-authorship statistics [ 5 , 10 ]. At the academic journal level, studies are primarily concerned with issues of knowledge dissemination and transfer as well as journal quality and impacts [ 11 – 13 ]. Such studies are often used as guidelines to evaluate the quality of research output in academic institutions, make funding decisions, and help institutions formulate recommendations for tenure and promotion.

From the macro-level viewpoint of the academic field itself, which is the focus of this study, systematic examination of published scholarship is used to track evolution of the discipline, identify new trends and developments, point to gaps in knowledge and areas of inconsistency in research findings, suggest directions for future research, and, more generally, provide an up-to-date overview of the field [ 6 , 14 ]. For such a wide-ranging and diverse discipline as tourism, which is infused with contributions from various fields of inquiry, the analysis of its structural properties is of a particular value. Such analyses can outline not only current relationship dynamics of tourism with the ‘traditional’ study areas like sociology or marketing but also with more closely connected areas such as hospitality or leisure studies. For example, research by Cheng et al. [ 15 ] revealed that scholarly tourism journals have been diverging from leisure and well-being domain from which tourism research originated.

Evaluation of scholarly contributions in a particular field of study has social significance as well [ 7 , 15 ]. Two issues of social importance, in particular, have attracted attention from tourism researchers: geography and gender. Strong interest to these issues from the community of tourism scholars is manifested in conferences’ academic agendas, calls for papers for special journal issues, and recurring debates in professional networks such as TRINET. With respect to the geography issue, a long-standing concern has been the existing dominance of the Western perspective in tourism research and the underrepresentation of views not encompassed by the Western philosophical, social, and political tradition [ 16 , 17 ]. While geography typically represented by the first author’s institution cannot be equated with study’s perspective, viewpoint, or philosophy, the growing diversity in geography of tourism scholarship could serve as a feasible proxy.

Similarly, issues of gender parity in research, journal editorship, and education and administration have been brought into focus [ 18 , 19 ]. A recent issue of Anatolia journal, which is entirely devoted to the topic of gender in tourism academy, argues that “[g]iven that gender is so central to our identity formation and the structures of our societies, we question how it can be received as peripheral to the dominant discussions of the evolution of tourism knowledge and research production” [ 19 ]. In the articles tracking the scholastic achievement, the gender-related findings are typically reduced to the statements of women’s underrepresentation in the ‘most productive scholars’ lists (e.g., [ 20 ]). The direct tracing of the dynamics of gender representation in tourism scholarship has not yet been conducted. This is not surprising considering the variety of names from various corners of the world that are present in scholarly output and, until recently, the lack of methods to track the gender attribution of these names with high degree of confidence.

Recent developments in natural language processing and text mining allow analyses of voluminous data corpora that were not possible before. A document like an academic article deals with several issues at once and, thus, belongs to several subject areas, albeit with different ‘strength’ [ 21 , 22 ]. However, determining topical ‘strength’ has been a persistent problem in content analysis until very recently. The unsupervised classifiers such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) or Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and supervised classifiers such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), or Naïve Bayes deliver classification of documents into multiple categories, with category weights numerically expressed. Categories and their weights are discerned based on clusters of words that repeatedly co-occurred in textual segments, providing a more measured and objective classification. Further, with development of probabilistic methods of gender identification based on social network data mining and availability of online gender name-databases, the issue of gender identification in academic scholarship can be tackled with high degree of confidence. While text data mining methods have been percolating into tourism research (e.g., [ 23 , 24 ]), study utilizing text mining approaches for content analysis of unstructured data are still in single digits [ 25 – 27 ]. Thus, recent methodological developments paved the way to the analyses conducted in this study to determine as objectively as possible subject areas of tourism research and their evolution over more than 40 years, as well as geography and gender distribution of tourism scholarship.

2. Tourism scholarship: Literature review

In bibliographic studies, the ancillary information that accompanies each journal publication (e.g., year of publishing or number of citations) allows quick summaries, aggregation, and production of trends. The textual information, however, contained in the articles or their abstracts is more difficult to summarize and interpret. Studies that are concerned with subject areas of tourism research and/or developments in the field method-wise lean to one of the two main approaches: content analysis or quantitative relational analysis. Content analysis and its multiple variants include categorization of textual units using pre-specified or inductively derived lists of disciplinary foci, topical areas, keywords, or headwords, producing frequency counts with subsequent tabulation. The relational approach is an assemblage of quantitative techniques (e.g., co-citation analysis, network analysis) that compute similarity scores between units of analysis (e.g., articles or their authors) with subsequent clustering of those units and then visualize solutions with drafted networks of related articles/citations, scholars, and fields of study [ 6 , 10 , 28 ]. So far, the content analysis approach has been more popular with tourist researchers; however, relational techniques are gaining grounds with latest development in computational methods (see Table 1 ).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820.t001

2.1. Content analysis studies

An example of content analysis with pre-identified or inductively inferred categories would be Strandberg et al. [ 29 ] who evaluated scholarship published in journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research using 18 study areas provided by the journal itself as its scientific scope: “hospitality and tourism operations, marketing and consumer behavior, HR management, eTourism/eTravel. technology, planning and development, policy, performance and financial management, strategic implications, environmental aspects, forecasting and prediction, revenue management, impact assessment and mitigation, globalization, research methodologies, leisure and culture, risk management, and change management” (p. 9). The researchers added one more category, education, and coded 292 collected papers by their primary themes. Using three sequential 5-year periods, the authors were able to follow the dynamics of the primary themes in the journal scholarship.

Park et al. [ 30 ] identified 20 subject areas of tourism research published in six major tourism and hospitality journals (2,834 articles in total), drawing on previous studies and expert opinions. These areas included “attraction management; crisis and safety management; destination marketing and management; tourism development and residence perception; economic impact and econometrics; education; geographical issues; general marketing; image and branding; information technology; meetings, incentives, conventions, and exhibitions, including festivals and fairs; tourism planning; politics, policy, legal, and governmental issues; supply chain management; market segmentation; special interests tourism; service management; sustainable tourism and eco-tourism; tourists’ perceptions and behavior; and other” (p. 384). Classification articles into these pre-established categories was conducted by checking their title, abstract, keywords, and, in some of the cases, the entire content of the paper.

Ballantyne et al.[ 32 ] examined 2,868 academic articles published in 12 major tourism journals from the list provided by McKercher et al. [ 12 ] for a 20-year period (1994–2004), categorizing them into 21 topical areas. The areas were inductively derived based on examination of randomly drawn 200 articles from the total pool: tourist/visitor studies; destinations; tourism planning; marketing; cultural tourism; economic issues; tourism impacts; tourism trends; tourism research issues & methods; hospitality; eco-tourism; sustainable development; special events; transport; management; human resource management; environmental interpretation; tourism policy; tourism education and training; business tourism; and sports and leisure (p. 150). ‘Manual’ approach to content analysis required the researchers to select a stratified random subsample of 144 articles in order to provide a more detailed analysis of research trends in top four subject areas and scholarship in top three journals.

An example of content analysis using ‘proxy’ data is demonstrated by Cheng et al. [ 15 ] who identified the disciplinary foci of 59 tourism-related journals and tracked changes over three time periods. Researchers evaluated 21 disciplinary foci provided in the Goeldner et al. [ 33 ] list (e.g., anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics, marketing, etc.), found the list insufficient, and added eight supplementary disciplinary focuses: cultural/heritage study; management and administration; finance; computer science/technology; gerontology; literature; medicine, and philosophy/religion. Then, journal mission statements were examined to identify the disciplinary areas on which each particular journal was focusing. At this step, researchers followed the protocol of content analysis and calculated the inter-rater agreement. The final counts were used to illustrate growth of tourism-related disciplinary foci over time.

2.2. Relational techniques

As can be seen from the discussed examples, the content analysis approach and its results are dependent on the researcher’s individual perspective in selecting categories for coding. Further, since the coding involves human raters, the more complex the system of categories is, the more difficult it is to maintain the efficiency of the analysis and the adequate inter-rater reliability. Journal articles are multidimensional textual units, but raters must force them into a specific topical category, introducing another source of bias based on raters’ preferences. One of the ways to escape the problem with uni-dimensionality would be to use an article’s ‘tagging words’ provided by the authors themselves (keywords) or by the journal (headwords). Thus, Swain et al. [ 31 ] identified subject areas of papers published in Annals of Tourism Research based on headwords taken from the journal’s subject index. Top ten out of 1,830 headwords were: impacts; organizations; development; research & development; United States; Third World; tourism; international tourism; planning; transport; tourism, study of; hotel; and conferences [ 31 ]. The words were interpreted as indicative of topical research interests.

Similarly, Xiao and Smith [ 14 ] used the Annals’ subject index to discern the knowledge domains in the journal papers. Fifty-two headwords were identified that represented eight subject areas which citation frequencies were rising: “typology of tourists, community and development, alternative experience/product, sociocultural aspects and change, geopolitical regions/focus, literature/research/methods, marketing and management, and environment” (p. 496). Twenty-seven headwords were grouped into nine categories of decreasing popularity: “economics, industry and transportation, hospitality, recreation, impacts, North America, tourism (in a conventional/narrow sense), Third World, and sociology” (p. 496). The authors, however, acknowledged that the keyword and headword analyses provided inconsistent results, highlighting the subjectivity of the selected tagging words, as well as a large amount of subjective reasoning involved in aggregating the tagging words into larger themes or categories [ 31 ].

The information that is common to any two articles, whether it is keywords, headwords, authors, or references, allows for producing measures of similarity that can serve as a foundation for quantitative relational techniques. For example, co-citation analysis is based on the idea that the more cited works the two particular articles share, the closer these two articles are conceptually [ 28 ]. Yuan et al. [ 6 ] employed a modification of co-citation analysis, which they named bibliographic coupling: “Quantitatively speaking, the more common references two papers cite, the more closely the two papers relate to each other and the higher its BC strength” (p. 5). The articles were clustered based on the similarity scores but cluster labeling, that is, identification of subject areas, involved reading titles and abstracts of articles in the individual clusters. To facilitate spotting topics for each cluster, text data mining approach was employed [ 34 ]; it generated the top five terms for each cluster for further labeling by two tourism field experts.

With more relevance to the goal of this particular paper, Mazanec [ 26 ] tested whether LDA and SVM text data mining methods can detect change in the language of tourism research in order to answer a broad question of “whether, over the decades, the study of tourism has changed focus and touched on new issues or has been largely reiterating traditional viewpoints” [ 26 ]. The study found statistically significant temporal differences in frequencies of identified word groups; however, the study did not interpret these word groups in terms of research topics, or subject areas and advocated pursuing the scientific issue of text mining further to detect the reasons and contents of change. With this in mind, the study identified three specific research questions for investigation: (1) What are the subject areas in tourism research from its inception in the early 1970s to the present day and their temporal dynamics? (2) Where did tourism research develop and what is the spatial dynamics of its geography? (3) What is the gender of tourism scholarship and its temporal distribution? The study aims at objective and reliable identification of spatiotemporal distributions of tourism subject areas, geography, and gender using published tourism scholarship as the primary data source. The study selected LDA as a text mining method, which is described in section 3.2.

3.1 Data collection

We collected abstracts from the “Big Three” [ 35 ] tourism journals: Annals of Tourism Research ( ATR ), Journal of Travel Research ( JTR ), and Tourism Management (together with its predecessor, the International Journal of Tourism Management ) ( TM ) for a period of more than 40 years. These three foremost journals in the tourism field have maintained their leading positions for a long time, as confirmed by their journal rankings ( www.scimagojr.com ), impact factors, citation indices, and published literature reviews [ 5 , 7 , 12 , 13 , 35 , 36 ]. They can be viewed as analogous to ‘prestige press’ newspapers in political, media, and communication studies that act as trendsetters in the field of tourism research [ 8 , 10 , 14 , 26 , 31 , 37 , 38 ]. Abstracts rather than whole documents were selected as the most precise and concise representation of articles’ essence, including its subject area.

All the abstracts stored in the Scopus publication database for these three journals were downloaded, resulting in 8,890 article abstracts with publication dates ranging from 1974 until August 2017. Note that the publication date may differ from the date an article becomes available to readers. Standard procedures of data quality control were then applied (e.g., [ 39 ]). First, changing data formatting issues were resolved. Then, abstracts from other journals accidentally included in the database and duplicate entries were removed, resulting in 7,427 articles. Of these entries, 6,110 papers included abstracts ( ATR : 1,676 abstracts; JTR : 1,413 abstracts; and TM : 3,021 abstracts). The entries with missing abstracts mainly represented editorials, reviews, and similar publications; also note that the practice of requiring the abstracts was not yet firmly established at the beginning of the search period. Those entries without abstracts were used in the geographical and gender trend analysis, but not in the subject area content analysis.

Collected publication metadata contained the following information: publication ID in Scopus database; ISSN; title; date, volume, issue, and number of pages of the publication; name and affiliation of the first author; and the number of papers citing the publication. The author affiliation field was missing for 6.3% of entries, the author’s name was missing in 0.9%, and all other fields were missing in less than 0.1% of entries. Fig 1 shows the temporal distribution of collected data. Only the first author’s name was present in Scopus database; thus, all 7,427 papers, including those with missing abstracts, were then processed through Microsoft Academic Search to extract the records for the remaining authors. This search identified 7,045 papers; 382 papers were not present in the Microsoft publication database.

Note that the reduced number of article in 2009 is not a data collection artifact: compare Tourism Management volume 28 (2007, 1592 pages), volume 30 (2009, 936 pages) and 32 (2011, 1496 pages). The solid line represents the total number of journal papers in Scopus database with and without the abstracts.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820.g001

3.2 Content analysis with LDA

The Latent Dirichlet Allocation method (LDA) [ 40 ] models a collection of documents where each document contains multiple topics (latent variables) represented through its words (observed variables). The LDA approach then attempts to find latent topics based on the distribution of the observed words over the documents. The LDA model was successfully used to extract content from the abstracts of papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science [ 41 ]. Talley et al. [ 42 ] used a similar method to extract the topics from ca. 80,000 grant proposals that received awards form the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Sugimoto et al. [ 43 ] applied LDA to the titles and abstracts of doctoral dissertations defended in library and information science with the goal of extracting dominant topics and identifying changes in the field over time. In the applied sciences, Moro et al. [ 44 ] analyzed the full texts of business intelligence publications with LDA and identified research trends and prospective research topics in the field. Sing et al. [ 45 ] used LDA to process over 25,000 abstracts from medical journals to identify research topics related to spinal care. Zhang et al. [ 46 ] used LDA to extract the topics from the abstracts of medical and biomedical papers published by 20 leading UK universities with the overall goal of estimating the “newsworthiness” of research in respective areas for the general mass media.

Extracting the subject areas of publications from the collected abstracts and examining their spatial and temporal variability was achieved by performing an automated search for similar patterns of words appearing in different documents. Formally, we constructed a probabilistic model of the abstracts collection through a Bayesian analysis of their texts. The analysis included the following steps, as outlined in [ 47 ]. Steps 1–8 were performed with the RapidMiner data mining platform [ 48 ], while Step 9 was performed with a program written in Python using an open-source Python LDA package ( http://pythonhosted.org/lda ):

• Tokenization: breaking the sentences into discrete words and word combinations;
• Part-of-speech (POS) tagging: marking each word in the sentence according to the corresponding part of speech;
• Removal of stop words: elimination of common words (such as “the”) in the English language that are irrelevant in identifying the specific themes appearing in the texts. The stop words include prepositions, articles, pro-nouns and other frequent words that are equally likely to be present in documents from different topics. We used the Porter stop word list supplied with RapidMiner platform and then a custom stop list ( S2 File );
• POS-based text reduction: elimination of all words other than those tagged as “noun” or “adjective”. Different types of automated text analysis concentrate on words from different POSs (e.g., adjectives are useful for sentiment analysis); however, topical analysis is primarily based on the texts’ nouns. It has been shown (e.g., [ 49 ]) that eliminating all other POS words improves article topic extraction. We found, however, that the inclusion of adjectives (e.g., “historical”, “authentic”, etc.) improves topic recognition in tourism related texts;
• Stemming: reducing inflected words to their word roots, performed using the Porter stemmer [ 50 ];
• Bigram collection: joining sequential tokens. Bigrams allow an analysis based on a group of words as opposed to a single word. For example, a documents containing words “tourism industry” would produce two unigram tokens: "tourism" and "industry" and one bigram: “tourism_industry”;
• Synonym replacement: merging words with identical meanings such as “tourism industry" and "tourist industry". See S2 File for the synonym list;
• Co-occurrence matrix creation: First, all words left in the documents are joined into a global dictionary containing N words. Then, each document is represented by an N-dimensional vector based on the presence or absence of a specific word from the dictionary in that document. Then, a co-occurrence matrix is formed by the vectors representing all documents. Three different schema of co-occurrence matrix creation were explored: binary term occurrence, term occurrence—inverse document occurrence (TF/IDF), and term occurrence. The term occurrence schema was selected because it returned the most consistent topics.
• Topic extraction with LDA. We used the latent Dirichlet allocation using Gibbs sampling Python package ( https://github.com/lda-project/lda ).
• Interpretation of words from identified latent topics as tourism concepts belonging to a particular subject area in tourism research.

The issues of selecting the number of topics (K) and values of the model parameters α and β are related to step 9 of LDA application. The formal method of selecting K value based on maximization of a model fit metrics (such as log likelihood) has been criticized in the literature for returning a very large number of topics, many of which are not semantically meaningful (e.g., see the influential paper by a team of researchers from Facebook, University of Maryland, and Princeton University [ 51 ]). Instead, it has been suggested that model selection should focus on topic interpretability because “there is no gold-standard list of topics to compare against for every [textual data] corpus” [ 51 ]. Subsequently, we processed the abstracts by extracting K latent topics, varying K from 10 to 30, and manually evaluating the extracted topics each time. We found that higher K values tended to return topics with similar content. In contrast, lower values of K tended to return very complex topics. Based on this preliminary analysis and following the recommendations in [ 51 ], we selected K value of 14.

Two other model parameters, α and β, define the theoretical distribution of topics over the documents. A literature review showed that the commonly accepted values are α ≈ 0.1 and β = [0.01, 0.1] (e.g., [ 41 ]), with a lower α returning fewer dominant topics per document and a lower β returning topics with less similarity. Accordingly, we selected α = 0.1 and β = 0.01. To validate the β selection, we additionally ran the model with the values β = 0.05 and β = 0.1 but found only insignificant changes in the topics expressed as a slightly higher degree of topic intersection.

4.1 Subject areas: What is being published?

The analysis of the abstracts resulted in a 14-topic solution, in which each topic was represented by multiple words with different weights. By consulting the original abstracts in the database for each topical cluster, the interpretive concepts for subject areas were identified. Then, these concepts were joined under one “umbrella” name. To provide an example, the ten most representative words for topic 5 were service , satisfaction , quality , value , relationship , attribute , custom , intention , brand , and airline ( Table 2 ). The interpretive concepts were identified as follows: customer satisfaction; service quality; purchase intention; value; and product attributes . These concepts were joined under the subject area ‘service quality and satisfaction’. To illustrate the result in more detail, we created a supplementary S1 File , which provides representative abstracts from the database that obtained the highest scores on their respective subject areas. The abstract with the highest score for the subject area "service quality and satisfaction" is presented below (1000 is the maximum score).

“In highly competitive markets , customer satisfaction is a key driver of performance , making its measurement and management crucial . Most studies on customer satisfaction take an aggregate standpoint and do not consider segment-specific differences in attribute importance . In this article , the authors report on customer satisfaction with alpine ski resorts . They hypothesize that personal , situational , and product factors moderate the relationship between attribute performance and overall satisfaction . The results show that these factors indeed influence the attribute-performance-satisfaction relationship . Theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed . ” (Score: 892; abstract # 42449160073.)

Each topic is represented by multiple terms; only the first ten words with the highest weights are included. Note that the original terms were represented by word roots; the terms were converted to representative nouns and adjectives to improve readability.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820.t002

The temporal dynamics of popularity of any single subject area (as a share of the entire volume) changes across time ( Fig 2 ). For example, subject area ‘tourism demand’ (# 11) falls in popularity, while the popularity of ‘service quality and satisfaction’ (#5) increases. The comparative interest in the issues of sustainable tourism (# 13) and tourism and local communities (# 14) remains relatively constant. Overall, at present, across all three journals, the issues represented by subject areas ‘tourism as a social phenomenon’ (# 1), ‘service quality and satisfaction’ (# 5), and ‘tourist experience and motivation’ (# 8) are slightly more popular compared to the issues emphasized by other areas.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820.g002

The results ( Table 3 , Fig 3 ) indicate that some of the identified topics are common to all three journals, while others are more journal-specific. According to LDA analysis, ATR is highly interested in studies that view tourism as a social phenomenon and involve a variety of disciplinary perspectives. This is quite consistent with the journal self-identification as a “social sciences journal focusing upon the academic perspectives of tourism. In this role, ATR is structured by the research efforts of a multidisciplinary community of scholars” [ 36 ]. Subject area of tourism as a social phenomenon, which draws heavily on theoretical developments in anthropology and sociology and heavily involves qualitative methods of analysis, is published disproportionately more often in ATR . LDA analysis identified the higher interest of TM in the issues related to tourism industry and tourism demand, as compared to the other two publications, consistent with TM orientation as an outlet “concerned with the planning and management of travel and tourism” [ 36 ]. JTR “focuses on travel and tourism behavior, management and development… with diversity in research topics and methodologies” [ 36 ]. In analysis, JTR emerged as a well-rounded journal topic-wise that demonstrates more interest in modeling and forecasting than do the other two journals and publishes more conference announcements, primarily for the TTRA annual conference.

The areas are numbered as follows: 1: Tourism as a social phenomenon; 2: Image and risk; 3: Attractions; 4: Tourism industry; 5: Service quality and satisfaction; 6: Modeling and forecasting; 7: Conferences; 8: Tourist experience and motivation; 9: Market segmentation; 10: Decision making process; 11: Tourism demand; 12: Governing tourism development; 13: Sustainable tourism; 14: Local communities.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820.g003

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820.t003

4.2 Geography: Where do they publish from?

We used the first author’s affiliation data to discern the geographical pattern of tourism research. In total, the tourism journals published papers led by authors from 83 countries ( Table 4 ). Fig 4 shows the change in the relative number of papers published in various countries over time. Note that the figure shows only countries from which at least 1% of the overall paper volume within the study period was published, or at least 3% of the number of papers within any sequential 5-year period. All other countries are merged into the “Other” category. Note also that while the affiliation was missing in only 6.3% of the papers, the distribution of the missing papers over time was not uniform. At the beginning of the research period (up to 1995), the percentage of papers with missing affiliations in each year was high (mean = 18%). However, in 1996 and beyond, the percentage of missing affiliations was sharply reduced (mean = 1%). In Fig 4 , the papers with missing affiliations are ignored.

Publication country is defined from the affiliation of the first author. The countries shown have at least 1% of the total number of publications or at least 3% of publications in any 5-yeat period. To smooth over temporal variability, the figure shows 5-year running mean.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820.g004

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820.t004

The distribution pattern in Fig 4 and the numbers from Table 4 indicate that articles from the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada account for a large portion of tourism scholarship, especially in the beginning of the study period. However, their relative combined output dropped from 64% in 1978–1987 to 43% in 2008–2017, while scholarship from countries such as Mainland China, Spain, and Taiwan grew noticeably. In particular, Mainland China increased its output from 1% in 1978–1987 to 5% in 2008–2017, or even more if we look only at the last few years depicted in Fig 4 . It is also worth noting that the Other category ( Table 4 ) accounts for 19% of the total scholarly output in the last period, compared to 6% at the beginning. The Other category includes 70 countries, of which the ten largest contributors are Austria, Norway, France, Portugal, Sweden, Germany, Macao, Switzerland, Singapore, and Greece. The authors also visualized dynamics of geographical representation of various world regions (by the location of the first author’s institution) in tourism studies, using, for contrast, the earliest (1972–1987) and latest (2007–2017) periods ( Fig 5 ). The expansion to Asian, Middle East, African, and South American regions is clearly visible.

The color scale indicates percentage of papers coming from a specific country; papers with unknown authors’ affiliation are not taken into account. Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao are presented separately, following Scopus database format.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820.g005

4.3 Gender: Who is publishing?

The authors’ gender was identified from their first names using the Genderize.io software, which predicts the probability of a specific name to belong to a certain gender from statistics extracted from social network accounts. For example, Genderize.io has 763 people whose first name is ‘Kim’ in its database; of these, 687 are females. Hence, the estimated probability of a person with the first name ‘Kim’ being a female is 90%. Only the authors whose gender was identified with at least 0.6 probability were retained; the rest of the authors were excluded, which resulted in 5,591 unique authors, including 3,064 unique first authors (which constitutes 79% / 80%, respectively, of the authors/first authors identified through Microsoft Academic search). The authors whose gender could not be clearly identified were mainly (1) those where the Microsoft Academic database included only initials, and (2) those with names from China. We speculate that the latter bias relates to the way the Genderize.io database was built: the gender was extracted from social network registration records. Because Chinese nationals are restricted in their use of the major international social networks such as Twitter and Facebook by the legislative and technological actions, the Genderize.io Chinese name base might be limited.

The results indicate that the percentage of papers authored by male tourism researchers has fallen steadily throughout the study period, from 93% in the 1970s to 60% in the 2010s ( Table 5 , column Total). The percentage of male scholars as first authors showed similar dynamics, falling from 93% in the 1970s to 57% in the 2010s ( Table 5 , column Male First Authors). The corresponding yearly dynamics are shown in Fig 6 ; note that the figure starts from 1976 to include only those years in which the genders of at least 20 first authors could be identified. Overall, through the years all journals display the same trend of increased share of female tourism scholarship, both within the authorship team and as the first author.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820.g006

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820.t005

5. Discussion

Using a text mining approach, namely, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, the study identifies 14 subject areas in tourism scholarship from more than four decades of research. It concludes that LDA is sensitive enough to detect interpretable topics and their trends in large volumes of textual material. Drawing on Mazanec [ 26 ], the study contributes to tourism literature by extending methods for identification of subject areas from tracking separate words as indicators of research interest [ 14 , 31 ] to deriving latent topics via text mining algorithms. The findings indicate that the identified subject areas have been in existence for the whole period of analysis, yet fluctuations in interest to those research topics have been detected. It is important to notice that the existence of the same topics during 40 years does not mean that no innovations have occurred in how researchers address pertinent issues of these areas in terms of conceptual foundations, methods of analysis, or geographical context. A more finely granulated analysis would allow identification of more specific and detailed areas of study, as topics can fragment into sub-themes when different parameters for the analysis are chosen.

The most noticeable fluctuations in relative shares of the 14 identified knowledge domains ( Fig 4 ) reflect the growing interest of researchers to the tourist as an individual, rather than tourism industry as a system. This interest transcends in such topics as tourist experience and motivation (topic 8) as well as service quality and satisfaction (topic 5). All three journals, ATR, JTR, and TM, capture this interest to individual tourist experiences, while primarily JTR and TM reflect interest to issues of quality and satisfaction ( Table 3 ). The studies of tourism from the macro perspectives of Tourism industry (topic 4), Modeling and forecasting (topic 6), Market segmentation (topic 9), Governing tourism development (topic 12) demonstrate a steady performance or, as is the case with Tourism demand (topic 11), decreases throughout the years. It is still a question how much the identified dynamics are due to the actual interest of researchers in a particular knowledge domain and how much it is reflective of the “Big Three” journal policies and preferences. One has to bear in mind that four decades ago there were much fewer tourism journals than now; therefore, less “generalistic” and more “specialty” journals like for example Journal of Sustainable Tourism , Tourism Geographies , or Tourism Economics may have drawn towards themselves research on particular topics since they were established. However, since new journals have been created in all the areas of tourism studies in the considered time frame, if is not possible to numerically estimate the influence of their topical distribution to the study findings.

With respect to geographical dynamics of tourism scholarship, the findings indicate that it has been expanding (Figs 4 and 5 ). In Table 4 , the Other category contains a large share of countries, including Macao, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, South Africa, India, Cyprus, Brazil, Poland, Thailand, and many others that are culturally different from the ‘collective West’ countries of the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and Western Europe [ 52 ]. This expansion does not necessarily mean that a non-Western perspective is expanding as well, since authors from non-Western cultures can adopt a Western worldview, but encouraging nevertheless. Further, the identified themes mostly reflect tourism as an industry, emphasizing marketization and segmentation, management issues, demand and consumption, and hedonic orientation and are largely associated with the Western perspective in the studies of tourism [ 16 ]. It also seems that alternative, non-consumption-oriented themes are predominantly reflected in studies classified under the topics ‘tourism as a social phenomenon’ and ‘sustainable tourism.’ To verify this assumption, we examined LDA classifications of three articles presented by Higgins-Desbiolles [ 16 ] as reflecting a non-Western perspective on tourism: [ 53 – 55 ].

Inayatullah [ 55 ] addresses an Islamic outlook on tourism as haji , where “travel or the accumulation of wisdom, ilm , is the essence of Islam. Travelling, visiting wise people, finding holy sites, was an integral part of life” (p. 411). The LDA solution classified this paper as sustainable tourism (446), tourism as a social phenomenon (291), tourism experience and motivation (145), and conferences (145) (the weights shown in parentheses total 1,000). Berno [ 54 ] studies how Polynesian people from the Cook Islands engaged with tourism and integrated it into their value system. The article was classified as tourism as a social phenomenon (319), tourist experience and motivation (296), sustainable tourism (182), tourism industry (136), and governing tourism development (65). Finally, the article by Allcock and Przeclawski [ 53 ] is an introduction to an ATR thematic edition on tourism in centrally planned economies; it does not have an abstract and, therefore, was not classified. Consequently, we analyzed another paper [ 56 ] by the same first author found in our database. This paper addressed the potential of planned economies for tourism development and was classified as sustainable tourism (234), governing tourism development (214), tourism as a social phenomenon (112), tourism industry (112), tourism demand (88), service quality and satisfaction (65), image and risk (57), tourist experience and motivation (54), market segmentation (30), and conferences (29). The only three topics with zero weights were attractions, modeling and forecasting, and local communities. As evidenced by the provided examples, the assignment into topics is quite solid.

Gender wise, the study has shown that the presence of female scholarship in the body of tourism research has been steadily increasing throughout the years. This finding is consistent across several methods used. Moreover, the citations analysis does not indicate that currently the works by female authors are lesser sited ( Table 5 ). The authors want to note, however, that these results by themselves do not support or refute any claim or statement regarding whether the parity between male and female representation in tourism academia, research, or leadership has been reached [ 19 ]. However, the social progress through the years has been clearly demonstrated by the analysis, together with the positive developments in geographic location of research contributors. These two findings, together with identification of dominant subject areas in tourism research in an objective way via text mining methods are considered the main contributions of the article to the tourism literature.

5.1. Limitations and future research

It might seem that the solution is highly dependent on number K of topics chosen. However, in the authors’ experience, it is not so. The range of 10–30 solutions was examined, and, while some of the key words were re-distributed across the topics, the main themes were nevertheless present in the solution. It should also be noted that deriving a large number of topics introduces redundancy in interpretation that may be less convenient for making summaries [ 51 ]. Yet, using a larger number of topics is possible, as shown by Kirilenko and Stepchenkova [ 57 ] who employed principal component analysis to identify themes in public discourse on climate change. Importantly, the LDA approach demonstrated in this paper is scalable. Researchers can select a theme of interest, identify articles that pertain most strongly to this theme, and conduct LDA on that textual corpus to obtain various subtopics of the theme. Furthermore, when researchers know what words they want to track, they can easily do so; for example, it is quite possible to track the dynamics of SEM analysis, sentiment analysis, or some other method in tourism studies.

As can be seen from the examples in the preceding section, some topics have less “face validity” than others, namely, the topic labeled as ‘conferences’. To understand this issue better, note that the authors did not ‘sift through’ the abstracts downloaded from the Scopus database; therefore, not only research articles but other materials such as conference announcements and reports are also present in the database. The decision to keep these materials in the database was based on the following reasons: 1) ‘weeding out’ is largely a manual procedure [ 5 ] that is inherently subjective and hence to some degree negates the use of mostly automatic classification; 2) the share of such materials in the total textual corpus is small (our estimation is under six percent); and (3) these materials, while structurally different from research articles, also signal topical interest in tourism as a field of study.

Finally, this research is limited to the "Big Three" tourism journals: the most reputable, highly cited journals with a long history. Because of that, we presumed these journals to be representative of tourism- related literature. However, this might have made our results dependent to some degree on the methodological preferences of these journals’ editorial boards (e.g., for a hypothesis-driven as opposed to a data driven research such as one used as this paper). That raises a possibility of some cutting-edge tourism research topics shifting to other journals, escaping our analysis. One possible example of such topic would be climate change impact on tourism, which is mainly published in Journal of Sustainable Tourism or in high-ranking non-tourism journals such as Climatic Change. A wider data sample would present a clearer picture of the emerging topics and their contribution to overall tourism scholarship.

Supporting information

S1 file. publication data used in this research..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820.s001

S2 File. Stop words and synonym dictionary.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206820.s002

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Components of tourism: Structure of the tourism industry

The travel and tourism industry is argued by many as being the largest industry in the world. It is, therefore, no surprise that the structure of the tourism industry is quite complex, involving many components of tourism.

With many different types of tourism and types of businesses operating within the tourism industry, from private companies to charities and NGOs, the structure of the tourism industry is made up of many different segments and components.

In this article I will provide you with an overview of the structure of the tourism industry, outlining the types of organisations and stakeholders in tourism that are involved.

Structure of the tourism industry

Components of tourism, international organisations, national tourist boards, regional tourist boards, tourist information centres, travel by air, travel by road, travel by train, travel by water, hotels chains, hostels and budget accommodation, holiday parks and campsites, accommodation innovations, world travel market, football world cup, glastonbury, holi festival, day of the dead, natural attractions, built attractions, tour operators, travel agents, ancillary services, components of tourism | structure of the tourism industry, structure of the tourism industry | components of tourism: further reading.

The importance of tourism is demonstrated when you can see how big the industry is!

The structure of the industry is made up of several components of tourism and involves many different stakeholders. These components are all interrelated in one way of another. The components of tourism make up the entire tourism system.

There are several integral components of tourism. Without these components, the tourism industry would struggle to function. I have explained what this means below, but before you read on, take a look at this short video that I made (and if you like what you see, don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel)!

This was demonstrated, for example, during the Coronavirus pandemic, which halted air travel around the world. Travel services are a vital component of tourism and without these services being operational, the tourism industry struggled to survive!

There are six major components of tourism, each with their own sub-components. These are: tourist boards, travel services, accommodation services, conferences and events, attractions and tourism services.

Below, I will explain what each of the components offer to the tourism industry and provide some relevant examples.

Components of tourism: Tourist boards

A tourist board is an essential component of tourism and an integral part of the structure of the tourism industry.

A tourism board is responsible for the promotion of tourism in a particular area. This could be a city, a region, a country or a group of countries.

A tourism board is usually Government funded and is usually a public travel and tourism organisation (although this is not always the case).

A tourism board is also often referred to as a Destination Marketing Organisation (DMO).

Most tourist boards focus on promoting tourism in a particular area, city or country. There are, however, some organisations which aim to promote tourism across more than one country.

Whilst these organisation often have many functions other than tourism, they will also play a role in the promotion of tourism in particular parts of the world. This could include the European Union , the ASEAN network or organisations such as the United Nations.

A national tourist board is a national organisation whose aim is to promote tourism across the country.

There are usually several management bodies that are involved with a national tourist board. They are essential stakeholders who determine many aspects of tourism in the country, such as budgets, taxation and regulations.

Said management bodies include the parliament, the tourist board, an auditing committee and the Prime Minister, President or Head of State.

The national tourist board is funded from tourist taxes, membership fees, Government funding and other sources.

Examples of national tourist boards (often most commonly referred to by their ‘campaign title’ as opposed to the Government title) include Visit Britain , Incredible India and Amazing Thailand .

A regional tourist board is a tourist board that focusses on a particular region of a country. They are often a sub-division of a country’s national tourist board.

Regional tourism boards are often funded and operated in the same way as national tourist boards.

Examples of successful regional tourism boards include: Visit Cornwall in the UK, Kerala Tourism in India, Visite Montreal in Canada and Cape Town Tourism in South Africa.

A tourist information centre is the place where tourists can go for advice and help with regards to all matters related to tourism in the area.

In the tourist information centre (TIC) you will find staff who are knowledgeable about the local area. There will often be a range of printed and digital information for you, including leaflets, maps, coupons and guidebooks. Sometimes there will be virtual tourism facilities.

Tourist information centres have been an important component of tourism throughout the history of travel and tourism , however, they are coming under increasing pressure as a result of information that is available online. This has resulted in fewer people visiting TICs in person.

Most major tourist areas will have a tourist information centre. These are usually centrally located.

Tourist information centres are funded by the local Government.

Other posts that you might be interested in: – What is tourism? A definition of tourism – The history of tourism – Stakeholders in tourism – Dark tourism explained – What is ABTA and how does it work? – The economic impacts of tourism

Components of tourism:Transport services

The relationship between transport and tourism is strong.

According to the most commonly accepted definitions of tourism, a person must travel away from their home environment for at least one night in order to be a tourist (although I would argue that this definition needs updating given that it doesn’t account for novel forms of tourism such as a staycation or virtual tourism ).

Based on this fact, therefore, transport is an integral component of tourism. Without transport, people cannot reach their intended destination.

There are a range of different transport types. The most common and popular methods of transport that make up the structure of the tourism industry, however, are: air, road, train and water .

Travel by air has grown exponentially in the past few decades. With the introduction of low cost airlines and deregulation, the competitive market has been a tourist’s paradise.

New routes opening up has introduced tourists to areas that they may never have been able to reach before and low prices have resulted in more of us taking more trips abroad using air travel as our means of transportation.

Travel by air is an essential component of tourism and this was demonstrated during the Coronavirus epidemic. During this time most air traffic was halted, which had a devastating impact of the tourism industry world-wide.

Travel by road is also a core component of tourism, particularly for domestic tourism .

Travel by road is more popular in some countries than others. This largely depends on accessibility options (i.e. what is accessible by road), distances required and road conditions.

In destinations where travel by road is popular, there are often many car hire or rental companies.

Travel by train is very popular in destinations that have good rail networks in infrastructure.

In some parts of the world, such as China and Japan, there are world-class high-speed railways that can be more efficient than flying.

In other parts of the world, the rail journey is part of the tourism experience. A good example of this is the Siberian Railway.

In Europe you can buy an affordable interrail pass , which allows you to travel throughout Europe using the rail system.

Travel by water is also an important component of tourism.

The structure of the tourism industry includes cruises, ferries and leisure boats, among other types of travel by water.

Travel by water can vary considerably in price and can include anything from a round the world cruise to a short long tail ride in Thailand .

Components of tourism: Accommodation services

Accommodation services make up an important part of the structure of the tourism industry.

Whilst accommodation services were traditionally focussed mainly around the hotel industry, nowadays accommodation options for tourists are much more varied. This adds an additional layer of complexity to the structure of the tourism industry.

There are many hotel chains that operate throughout the tourism industry and that are a key component of tourism.

Multinational corporations have expanded throughout the tourism industry with key players being hotel chains such as Marriott, Radisson, Hilton, Travel Lodge and Holiday Inn.

However, hotel chains such as these have come under increased scrutiny as a result of the economic leakage in tourism that they cause.

Hostels and budget accommodation options are popular with budget travellers and backpackers.

There are a range of hostels found throughout the world. These are particularly popular in destinations where accommodation is expensive, such as London, New York and Singapore.

The Youth Hostel Association (YHA) and Hostelling International are popular hostel providers that are found across the UK and overseas.

Billy Butlin changed the face of the British holiday market with the introduction of his seaside holiday parks back in 1936.

Since this time, other similar chains have expanded throughout the UK and the rest of the world.

Camping is also an important component of tourism. There are camp sites situated throughout the world ranging from safari camps to glamping (glamorous camping).

Homestays have become an increasingly prominent component of tourism.

Whilst bed and breakfast accommodation has been around for a very long time, nowadays there are many more options that are grounded on the concept of a homestay.

The sharing economy has seen the growth and introduction of many types of accommodations into the travel and tourism sector that did not exist before.

The most popular of these is Airbnb, where people rent out a room or an entire property to tourists. You can read more about how Airbnb works here .

In recent years consumers have been demanding new and unusual experiences more than ever. In response to this, we have seen many accommodation innovations emerge throughout the world.

From staying in an ice hotel in Finland, to sleeping in a hammock in Borneo to a night in a haunted castle in Wales, there are many different types of accommodation options that can make your holiday a little bit more exciting!

Components of tourism: Conferences and events

Conferences and events make up a significant part of the structure of the tourism industry.

Conferences, which often come under business tourism , come in all shapes and sizes around the world.

From a small academic gathering to a large-scale summit involving national leaders from around the world, conferences are an important component of tourism.

Likewise, the event sector is also a significant part of the tourism industry.

There are millions of events that take place around the world each year that vary in size and function. Many of these form an integral part of the tourism industry.

Examples of major conferences and events around the world

There are many major conferences and events that take place around the world every year. Here are a few of my favourites:

The World Travel Market (WTM) is held in London each November. This is a large event that is held at the Excel venue.

WTM provides travel industry experts with the opportunity to showcase their work, learn more about the industry and to network.

ITB is the world’s leading international travel trade show. It is held in Berlin each year.

Similar to the WTM, this large-scale event enables industry professionals to network and undertake continuous professional development.

The vast majority of people are familiar with the Football World Cup.

The Football World Cup is held every four years in a different location.

The Football World Cup attracts millions of tourists from all over the world. The event also acts as a stimuli for tourism as the nation will often use the opportunity of hosting the event as a chance to market tourism in the area to those who are tuning in from their TVs from around the world.

Sports tourism , which includes events such as the Football World Cup, contributes significantly to the overall tourism industry.

Glastonbury is a popular British music festival. It takes place each summer in Somerset.

Glastonbury is a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts. In addition to music, the festival hosts dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret, and other arts to entertain visitors.

Glastonbury attracts many domestic tourists as well as international tourists.

San Fermin is a festival that is held in Pamplona, Spain each July.

San Fermin, also known as the ‘Running of the Bulls’ is a historically-rooted festival that lasts five days. It involves dancing, eating and drinking, games and the famous bull races and fights.

San Fermin has been subject to a lot of controversy in recent years, with many people protesting that it is a cruel form of animal tourism .

Holi Festival is known as the ‘festival of spring’, the ‘festival of colours’ or the ‘festival of love’.

Holi Festival is celebrated in India each year during the month of March.

Holi Festival is famous for the way in which coloured paints are used and often thrown onto people’s faces and clothes.

This is a Hindu festival that signifies the victory of good over evil.

The Day of the Dead festival, locally referred to as ‘Dia de los Muertos’, is a festival that is celebrated in November each year in Mexico.

This day is a celebration of the deceased, whereby it is believed that the alive and the dead are reunited. On this day many people will create offerings for the deceased.

Many people choose to dress up as skeletons and in halloween-type outfits and they celebrate with food, drink and music.

Components of tourism: Attractions

An essential component of the tourism industry are the tourist attractions.

There are a multitude of different tourist attractions around the world.

Some are built, some are natural. Some are paid, some are free. Some are famous, others are not. Some are large and some are small.

Natural attractions are just as it says on the tin – natural. In other words, they are attractions that have not been made by man.

Natural attractions are found all over the world and vary in size and scope. There is even a definitive list of the seven natural wonders of the world .

I have visited many natural attractions around the world, here is a list of some of my favourites:

• Drakansburg Mountains, South Africa
• Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania
• Mount Toubkal, Morocco
• Sahara Desert, Morocco
• Red Sea, Egypt
• Dead Sea, Israel
• Sierra Nevada, Spain
• Chicken Island, Thailand
• Niagara Falls, USA
• Rocky Mountains, Canada
• Pammukale Thermal Pools, Turkey
• Iceland (the island is filled with wonderful natural attractions!)
• Amazon Rainforest , Ecuador
• Cenotes, Mexico
• Iguazu Falls, Brazil
• The Great Barrier Reef, Australia
• Ha Long Bay, Vietnam
• Waterways of Kerela, India
• Mount Hallasan, South Korea

Built attractions also make up an important part of the structure of the tourism industry.

There are many built attractions throughout the world. Some attractions are built for the purpose of tourism, such as theme parks or museums. Other attractions are built for other purposes but then become tourist attractions, such as the Empire State Building or the Sydney Opera House.

I have visited many built attractions throughout the world. Here are some of my favourites:

• Robin Island, South Africa
• The Pyramids of Giza, Egypt
• La Sagrada Familia, Spain
• The Eiffel Tower, France
• The United States Capitol Building, USA
• Statue of Liberty, New York
• Petronas Towers, Malaysia
• Marina Sands Bay Hotel, Singapore
• Angkor Wat, Cambodia
• Taj Mahal, India
• Sydney Harbour Bridge, Australia
• Houses of Parliament, UK
• Sheikh Zayed Mosque, UAE

Components of tourism: Tourism services

Tourism services are an essential component of tourism. Without many tourism services, the tourism industry would fail to adequately function.

Below I will explain the three major tourism services that make up the structure of the tourism industry.

A tour operator is the individual or organisation who puts together a trip.

Typically, a tour operator would package together essential elements including accommodation, transport and transfer. They would then sell this package to the tourists.

However, tour operators are becoming fewer in recent years. Consumers are now far more Internet savvy and are more capable of researching the individual elements of their holiday and booking this independently. This is known as dynamic packaging .

Traditionally, a travel agent would sell the product that the tour operator has produced i.e. the package holiday.

While travel agents have and continue to sell individual holiday components, they have historically been most commonly used by tourists who wish to book a package holiday.

In today’s society, there is far less scope for travel agents than there used to be. A few years ago it would be easy to finish school and to get a job in a travel agent selling holidays. Now, however, people are more likely to set up their own travel agent business online or to be employed by an online retailer.

Many high street stores have now closed as there is little demand these days for holidays to be booked in this way. Instead, many people are selling holidays and travel services via their blogs or websites.

The travel agent does still exist, but he has changed the way he looks.

Ancillary services are another core component of tourism.

Ancillary basically means ‘extra’ or ‘additional’. An ancillary service in the context of tourism, therefore, is any product or service that is additional to the core elements of accommodation, transport and transfer.

Here are some examples of ancillary products:

• Attraction tickets
• Meal tickets
• Extra luggage
• Currency exchange
• Airport parking

As you can see, the tourism industry is large and complex, but understanding the different components of tourism isn’t too difficult.

All of the components of tourism are interconnected in one way or another and many rely on one another to be successful.

Want to learn more about the structure of tourism? I have listed some recommended texts below.

• An Introduction to Tourism : a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to all facets of tourism including: the history of tourism; factors influencing the tourism industry; tourism in developing countries; sustainable tourism; forecasting future trends.
• The Business of Tourism Management : an introduction to key aspects of tourism, and to the practice of managing a tourism business.
• Tourism Management: An Introduction : gives its reader a strong understanding of the dimensions of tourism, the industries of which it is comprised, the issues that affect its success, and the management of its impact on destination economies, environments and communities.

Data Analytics in Tourism Industry: What Is It, Benefits, How It’s Used, & Real-life Examples

What is data analytics in tourism?

Why is data analytics important for the tourism industry, what are the benefits of having data analytics in the tourism industry, how are data science and big data used in tourism industry analytics, real-life examples of data science usage in the tourism industry, how can descriptive analytics help travel agencies.

Big data and data analytics are most commonly tied with industries such as fintech and IT . However, a few years ago, they also made it into the travel sector. They didn’t just make it into the industry. The enormous adoption rates of data analytics in the sector have created a brand new market – the tourism industry and the big data analytics market. 

This market’s size reached $220 billion in 2022, and it’s projected to reach $350 billion by 2032 . We are talking about a CAGR of 15% here, which is huge!

If you are interested in whether big data and data analytics can benefit your business, you need to learn more about these concepts. Below you will find everything you need to assess their value, including real-life examples.

The best way to understand data analytics in tourism is to understand the concept of data analytics.  

Data analytics is a domain of data science . It refers to various processes and techniques developed to streamline raw data analysis . Its primary purpose is to help you make sense of data and use it to make informed conclusions and decisions.

Over the years, these processes and techniques have been successfully automated thanks to sophisticated algorithms. The travel sector can now efficiently utilize different types of data analytics. 

They can analyze data to see exactly what happened, called descriptive analytics. They can understand why something occurred thanks to diagnostic analytics . Alternatively, they can identify what will happen and what to do next, thanks to predictive and prescriptive analytics.

The data fed to data analytics algorithms is called big data. It only takes a quick literature review to find out the big data definition:

“Big data refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data-processing application software. It enables companies to do at a large scale that cannot be done at a smaller one, to extract new insights or create new forms of value, in ways that change markets, organizations, and more.”

Understanding tourist behavior through data analytics

Building on the previous discussion about what data analysis is, its purposes, and how to comprehend Big Data, we will focus on understanding tourist behavior through data analytics .

We must acknowledge that within an increasingly globalized market, data analytics plays a pivotal role in understanding tourist behavior, thereby enabling the best decision-making for the business.

To further clarify, let’s consider the case of “ The Hotels Network ”.

The Hotels Network is a company founded in 2015 with the goal of increasing direct bookings through hotel websites.

Thanks to the use of data analytics, they realized that there was a gap between the technology offered by hotel websites and that of major travel agencies , in response to customer demand and the need for online booking confirmation.

As a result, the implementation of their technology led to a 32% increase in online bookings through their channel.

Consequently, groups such as Barceló Hotels & Resorts or Petit Palace Hotels have incorporated The Hotels Network into their marketing chain.

The role of data analytics in the tourism and hospitality industry is becoming increasingly important with every passing year. Thanks to new IT technologies, companies in the travel sector can now efficiently track, record, store, and process big data, which enables even small companies to benefit from cutting-edge solutions. 

Advances in cloud technologies and infrastructure that support big data and data analytics enabled service providers to decrease costs. It simply means that the travel sector can now use big data in a cost-efficient manner. 

Data analytics unlocks many opportunities for travel companies. First and foremost, it allows people who are not data science experts to quickly review large-scale volumes of data . That is important because most of the touch points consumers have with travel businesses are now online, and each one produces some data. 

Big data and analytics can finally equip travel companies with everything they need to understand their target customers and capture more profit – or, in other words, gain a competitive advantage. 

At the same time, your business also generates internal data. Data analytics is essential because you can truly understand your business processes and how your company interacts with partners and customers.

Many scientific papers are trying to put a finger on the benefits data analytics unlocks for the tourism industry. While there are some subtle differences, all papers find out that big data, data analytics, ML, and AI-enabled strategies help unlock the following benefits.

Thanks to data analytics tools, travel agencies and tour operators can now better understand their markets. They can gauge the market performance to adopt new strategies or refine new ones to achieve more optimal results. 

They can better understand their customers and prospects as well. They can identify customer behavior patterns and customize their offer to reflect the current demand to attract more consumers and boost sales.

Data analytics can also help companies put their operations under a microscope. They can analyze the data they generate internally. It can help them achieve operational excellence, reduce operational costs, and make informed customization decisions to facilitate work for their staff. 

Data analytics also enables companies to gauge their supply chains. It allows them to source their products in a smarter and more informed manner, thus potentially increasing profit margins while still staying competitive within their markets. 

They can ultimately adopt new strategies to generate new revenue streams, maximize profits, and establish a better positioning within a target market.

Data science and big data have found many use cases in the tourism industry analytics. Travel organizations of all sizes are collecting and storing copious amounts of data. Some do it passively as their processes generate data. 

For instance, their website can automatically collect data with Google Analytics to facilitate web analytics . They can also store interactions with customers and previous purchase history to personalize service and offer relevant products to consumers.

Others adopt a more active approach, engaging in data-gathering activities such as data mining . It can help them optimize pricing strategies or identify viable marketing channels for specific markets. 

The primary role of big data in tourism industry analytics is to enable an accurate decision-making process. Proving accurate, updated, and structured data is paramount in this instance, as the quality analytics outcomes depend on all these factors.

In one study , scientists decided to further examine the impact of the rise of big data and analytics in the travel sector . They found out that most companies that adopt these new technologies do it because access to actionable data enables them to increase sales revenue, improve marketing initiatives, and get a competitive advantage.

One of the recent studies provides a systematic review of the big data use cases in the tourism industry. According to this study, the companies in the sector are using big data to:

• Custom-tailor travel products to meet the needs of market/audience segments;
• Improve cyber-security to enhance the travel experience;
• Create new value by espousing different types of interest;
• Gauge customer sentiment and identify factors of positive and negative engagement on social media.

Understanding data science, data analytics, and big data can be challenging, given that these are all new concepts. The best way to do it is to review some of the use cases. Below you can find real-life examples of data science usage in the tourism industry.

Venice and Salzburg as perfect examples of smart tourism destination

Smart tourism destination is a brand new kind of destination. It refers to destinations that heavily rely on technology to enhance their competitiveness, favor tourism development projects, and improve tourism experiences. These destinations promote the use of technology and capture consumers’ data to fine-tune their offers to deliver delightful experiences to tourists. 

The two examples of smart tourism destinations in practice are Venice and Salzburg, as outlined in this study . Using data analytics to model the experience process while visiting Venice and Salzburg helped define destination boundaries and better manage destination stakeholders. 

These two destinations managed to improve the co-creation of tourism experiences, be more sustainable and competitive, and promote sustainable tourism and sector development.

Fareboom’s success with the fare predictor tool

Freboom is one of the world’s most popular online travel agencies. They decided that big data and analytics could help them improve their travel booking website by offering attractive prices. To do it, they implemented a fare predictor tool.

The fare predictor tool uses a self-learning algorithm and goes through millions of website fare search records. The algorithm used factors such as demand growth and seasonal trends to predict future price movements, with a confidence rate of 75%. The final results are outstanding as the tool increased the average time a person spends on the Fareboom site by 100% .

Booking.com uses predictive analytics across departments

Booking.com doesn’t require a formal introduction as it’s one of the world’s largest travel marketplaces. When it comes to data analytics, Booking.com might just be a perfect example. Why? Because the company uses it to enable all its departments to make timely and informed decisions.

In one of the recent interviews , Lukas Vermeer, a data scientist at Booking.com, revealed that the company uses data analytics in web marketing, attribution models, ROI predictions, recommendation systems, call volume predictions, and scheduling algorithms. 

Mini Cambodian hotel uses big data as a starting point for hotel management

Mini-hotel in Cambodia decided to step up the hotel management strategy by using big data and data analytics. Their goal was to develop a new, more competitive, and cost-effective hotel management strategy. They started using one of the world’s top analytics tools to collect valuable data, including sales statistics, the booker’s country of origin, travel purpose, the device to book, and cancelation details, among others.

The case study reveals that big data and data analytics can be used as a starting point for improving hotel management strategies . In this case, big data enabled the hotel owner to identify new opportunities, find out means to pursue them in the most efficient manner, identify new areas of potential growth, and monitor the effect of the new strategy.

Hyatt’s intelligent virtual assistant and data analytics save the company $4.4 million

Hyatt is one of the largest hospitality companies out there. It handles hundreds of thousands of calls per month. Since it became borderline impossible to provide a great customer experience using only human assistants and agents, the company decided to deploy an intelligent virtual assistant.

The virtual assistant’s role was to automate the new reservation process, transfer callers, and automate, confirm, and cancel reservations. More importantly, it could collect data and feed it to the data analytics engine. Thanks to automation and data analytics, Hyatt reduced contact center costs by 33% and saved 94% on fully automated interactions which roughly translates into $4.4 million. 

Qantas airline significantly reduced the number and length of delays thanks to data analytics

As one of the world’s most reputable airlines, Qantas wanted to improve its schedule recovery to provide nothing but the best transportation experience to consumers. To do it, the company decided to make use of data. They invested in a schedule recovery solution that uses real-time data analytics to provide instant insights.

The results were outstanding. Qantas was able to assess all aspects of the operational costs, reduce the number and length of delays, and significantly reduce the cost of managing flight disruptions , whether due to weather conditions, excessive traffic, or unforeseen operational delays.

As we’ve previously stated, descriptive analytics provides answers to the “What happened” question. It can include various historical data types, but it can also be applied to data streams in real-time. With this in mind, descriptive analytics can help travel agencies in many ways:

• Better understand customers – a travel agency can track numerous behavioral metrics to truly understand customers and their preferences. Thanks to these insights, you can easily personalize your offer in a cost-efficient manner;
• Improve brand image – descriptive analytics can help travel agencies manage their brand reputation. They can mine data from social media platforms to gauge customer sentiment, respond to 
• Dynamic pricing management – imagine being able to adjust prices in real-time based on the supply, demand, and competitors’ prices. That’s precisely what descriptive analytics can offer to travel agencies of all sizes;
• Smart route optimization – cross-referencing logistics with customer behavioral data can help travel agencies further delight customers and make traveling more convenient. Smart route optimization refers to identifying and offering the most optimal flight and travel routes to customers;
• Make travel safer for everyone – fintech companies are already using descriptive analytics to detect frauds and anomalies in their transaction data sets. Travel companies can do it too to offer additional protection to their customers. With predictive analytics, they can easily detect unauthorized payments and stolen accounts.

Data analytics has found many applications in the travel sector. It can offer actionable insights and streamline the decision-making process, and many organizations are already using solutions with built-in data analytics capabilities. 

They have various goals ranging from improving customers’ experience to maximizing profits. Given that the tourism industry and big data analytics market are projected to continue to grow, the chances are that we are going to see even more use cases of data analytics in the sector .

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Marc Truyols has a degree in Tourism from the University of the Balearic Islands. Marc has extensive experience in the leisure, travel and tourism industry. His skills in negotiation, hotel management, customer service, sales and hotel management make him a strong business development professional in the travel industry.

Mize is the leading hotel booking optimization solution in the world. With over 170 partners using our fintech products, Mize creates new extra profit for the hotel booking industry using its fully automated proprietary technology and has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue across its suite of products for its partners. Mize was founded in 2016 with its headquarters in Tel Aviv and offices worldwide.

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UN Tourism | Bringing the world closer

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Glossary of tourism terms

Tourism is a social, cultural and economic phenomenon which entails the movement of people to countries or places outside their usual environment for personal or business/professional purposes. These people are called visitors (which may be either tourists or excursionists; residents or non-residents) and tourism has to do with their activities, some of which involve tourism expenditure.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

Activity/activities : In tourism statistics, the term activities represent the actions and behaviors of people in preparation for and during a trip in their capacity as consumers ( IRTS 2008, 1.2 ).

Activity (principal): The principal activity of a producer unit is the activity whose value added exceeds that of any other activity carried out within the same unit ( SNA 2008, 5.8 ).

Activity (productive): The (productive) activity carried out by a statistical unit is the type of production in which it engages. It has to be understood as a process, i.e. the combination of actions that result in a certain set of products. The classification of productive activities is determined by their principal output.

Administrative data : Administrative data is the set of units and data derived from an administrative source. This is a data holding information collected and maintained for the purpose of implementing one or more administrative regulations.

Adventure tourism : Adventure tourism is a type of tourism which usually takes place in destinations with specific geographic features and landscape and tends to be associated with a physical activity, cultural exchange, interaction and engagement with nature. This experience may involve some kind of real or perceived risk and may require significant physical and/or mental effort. Adventure tourism generally includes outdoor activities such as mountaineering, trekking, bungee jumping, rock climbing, rafting, canoeing, kayaking, canyoning, mountain biking, bush walking, scuba diving. Likewise, some indoor adventure tourism activities may also be practiced.

Aggregated data : The result of transforming unit level data into quantitative measures for a set of characteristics of a population.

Aggregation : A process that transforms microdata into aggregate-level information by using an aggregation function such as count, sum average, standard deviation, etc.

Analytical unit : Entity created by statisticians, by splitting or combining observation units with the help of estimations and imputations.

Balance of payments : The balance of payments is a statistical statement that summarizes transactions between residents and non-residents during a period. It consists of the goods and services account, the primary income account, the secondary income account, the capital account, and the financial account ( BPM6, 2.12 ).

Bias : An effect which deprives a statistical result of representativeness by systematically distorting it, as distinct from a random error which may distort on any one occasion but balances out on the average.

Business and professional purpose (of a tourism trip): The business and professional purpose of a tourism trip includes the activities of the self-employed and employees, as long as they do not correspond to an implicit or explicit employer-employee relationship with a resident producer in the country or place visited, those of investors, businessmen, etc. ( IRTS 2008, 3.17.2 ).

Business tourism : Business tourism is a type of tourism activity in which visitors travel for a specific professional and/or business purpose to a place outside their workplace and residence with the aim of attending a meeting, an activity or an event. The key components of business tourism are meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions. The term "meetings industry" within the context of business tourism recognizes the industrial nature of such activities. Business tourism can be combined with any other tourism type during the same trip.

Business visitor : A business visitor is a visitor whose main purpose for a tourism trip corresponds to the business and professional category of purpose ( IRTS 2008, 3.17.2 ).

Central Product Classification : The Central Product Classification (CPC) constitutes a complete product classification covering goods and services. It is intended to serve as an international standard for assembling and tabulating all kinds of data requiring product detail, including industrial production, national accounts, service industries, domestic and foreign commodity trade, international trade in services, balance of payments, consumption and price statistics. Other basic aims are to provide a framework for international comparison and promote harmonization of various types of statistics dealing with goods and services.

Census : A census is the complete enumeration of a population or groups at a point in time with respect to well defined characteristics: for example, Population, Production, Traffic on particular roads.

Coastal, maritime and inland water tourism : Coastal tourism refers to land-based tourism activities such as swimming, surfing, sunbathing and other coastal leisure, recreation and sports activities which take place on the shore of a sea, lake or river. Proximity to the coast is also a condition for services and facilities that support coastal tourism. Maritime tourism refers to sea-based activities such as cruising, yachting, boating and nautical sports and includes their respective land-based services and infrastructure. Inland water tourism refers to tourism activities such as cruising, yachting, boating and nautical sports which take place in aquatic- influenced environments located within land boundaries and include lakes, rivers, ponds, streams, groundwater, springs, cave waters and others traditionally grouped as inland wetlands.

Coherence : Adequacy of statistics to be combined in different ways and for various uses.

Competitiveness of a tourism destination : The competitiveness of a tourism destination is the ability of the destination to use its natural, cultural, human, man-made and capital resources efficiently to develop and deliver quality, innovative, ethical and attractive tourism products and services in order to achieve a sustainable growth within its overall vision and strategic goals, increase the added value of the tourism sector, improve and diversify its market components and optimize its attractiveness and benefits both for visitors and the local community in a sustainable perspective.

Consistency : Logical and numerical coherence.

Country of reference : The country of reference refers to the country for which the measurement is done. ( IRTS 2008, 2.15 ).

Country of residence : The country of residence of a household is determined according to the centre of predominant economic interest of its members. If a person resides (or intends to reside) for more than one year in a given country and has there his/her centre of economic interest (for example, where the predominant amount of time is spent), he/she is considered as a resident of this country.

Country-specific tourism characteristic products and activities : To be determined by each country by applying the criteria of IRTS 2008, 5.10 in their own context; for these products, the activities producing them will be considered as tourism characteristic, and the industries in which the principal activity is tourism-characteristic will be called tourism industries ( IRTS 2008, 5.16 ).

Cultural tourism : Cultural tourism is a type of tourism activity in which the visitor's essential motivation is to learn, discover, experience and consume the tangible and intangible cultural attractions/products in a tourism destination. These attractions/products relate to a set of distinctive material, intellectual, spiritual and emotional features of a society that encompasses arts and architecture, historical and cultural heritage, culinary heritage, literature, music, creative industries and the living cultures with their lifestyles, value systems, beliefs and traditions.

Data checking : Activity whereby the correctness conditions of the data are verified. It also includes the specification of the type of error or of the condition not met, and the qualification of the data and their division into "error-free data" and "erroneous data".

Data collection : Systematic process of gathering data for official statistics.

Data compilation : Operations performed on data to derive new information according to a given set of rules.

Data confrontation : The process of comparing data that has generally been derived from different surveys or other sources, especially those of different frequencies, in order to assess and possibly improve their coherency, and identify the reasons for any differences.

Data processing : Data processing is the operation performed on data by the organization, institute, agency, etc., responsible for undertaking the collection, tabulation, manipulation and preparation of data and metadata output.

Data reconciliation : The process of adjusting data derived from two different sources to remove, or at least reduce, the impact of differences identified.

Destination (main destination of a trip): The main destination of a tourism trip is defined as the place visited that is central to the decision to take the trip. See also purpose of a tourism trip ( IRTS 2008, 2.31 ).

Destination management / marketing organization (DMO) : A destination management/marketing organization (DMO) is the leading organizational entity which may encompass the various authorities, stakeholders and professionals and facilitates tourism sector partnerships towards a collective destination vision. The governance structures of DMOs vary from a single public authority to a public/ private partnership model with the key role of initiating, coordinating and managing certain activities such as implementation of tourism policies, strategic planning, product development, promotion and marketing and convention bureau activities. The functions of the DMOs may vary from national to regional and local levels depending on the current and potential needs as well as on the decentralization level of public administration. Not every tourism destination has a DMO.

Documentation: Processes and procedures for imputation,  weighting,  confidentiality  and suppression rules, outlier treatment and data capture should be fully documented by the  survey provider.  Such documentation should be made available to at least  the body financing the survey.

Domestic tourism : Domestic tourism comprises the activities of a resident visitor within the country of reference, either as part of a domestic tourism trip or part of an outbound tourism trip ( IRTS 2008, 2.39 ).

Domestic tourism consumption : Domestic tourism consumption is the tourism consumption of a resident visitor within the economy of reference ( TSA:RMF 2008, figure 2.1 ).

Domestic tourism expenditure : Domestic tourism expenditure is the tourism expenditure of a resident visitor within the economy of reference, (IRTS 2008, 4.15(a)).

Domestic tourism trip : A domestic tourism trip is one with a main destination within the country of residence of the visitor (IRTS 2008, 2.32).

Domestic visitor : As a visitor travels within his/her country of residence, he/she is a domestic visitor and his/her activities are part of domestic tourism.

Durable consumer goods : Durable consumer goods are goods that may be used repeatedly or continuously over a period of a year or more, assuming a normal or average rate of physical usage. When acquired by producers, these are considered to be capital goods used for production processes, as is the case of vehicles, computers, etc. When acquired by households, they are considered to be consumer durable goods ( TSA:RMF 2008, 2.39 ). This definition is identical to the definition of SNA 2008, 9.42 : A consumer durable is a goodthat may be used for purposes of consumption repeatedly or continuously over a period of a year or more.

Dwellings : Each household has a principal dwelling (sometimes also designated as main or primary home), usually defined with reference to time spent there, whose location defines the country of residence and place of usual residence of this household and of all its members. All other dwellings (owned or leased by the household) are considered secondary dwellings ( IRTS 2008, 2.26 ).

Ecotourism : Ecotourism is a type of nature-based tourism activity in which the visitor's essential motivation is to observe, learn, discover, experience and appreciate biological and cultural diversity with a responsible attitude to protect the integrity of the ecosystem and enhance the well-being of the local community. Ecotourism increases awareness towards the conservation of biodiversity, natural environment and cultural assets both among locals and the visitors and requires special management processes to minimize the negative impact on the ecosystem.

Economic analysis : Tourism generates directly and indirectly an increase in economic activity in the places visited (and beyond), mainly due to demand for goods and services thatneed to be produced and provided. In the economic analysis of tourism, one may distinguish between tourism's 'economic contribution' which refers to the direct effect of tourism and is measurable by means of the TSA, and tourism's 'economic impact' which is a much broader concept encapsulating the direct, indirect and induced effects of tourism and which must be estimated by applying models. Economic impact studies aim to quantify economic benefits, that is, the net increase in the wealth of residents resulting from tourism, measured in monetary terms, over and above the levels that would prevail in its absence.

Economic territory : The term "economic territory" is a geographical reference and points to the country for which the measurement is done (country of reference) ( IRTS 2008, 2.15 ).

Economically active population : The economically active population or labour force comprises all persons of either sex who furnish the supply of labour for the production of goods and services as defined by the system of national accounts during a specified time-reference period (ILO, Thirteenth ICLS, 6.18).

Economy (of reference): "Economy" (or "economy of reference") is an economic reference defined in the same way as in the balance of payments and in the system of national accounts: it refers to the economic agents that are resident in the country of reference ( IRTS 2008, 2.15 ).

Education tourism : Education tourism covers those types of tourism which have as a primary motivation the tourist's engagement and experience in learning, self-improvement, intellectual growth and skills development. Education Tourism represents a broad range of products and services related to academic studies, skill enhancement holidays, school trips, sports training, career development courses and language courses, among others.

Employees : Employees are all those workers who hold the type of job defined as "paid employment" (ILO, Fifteenth ICLS, pp. 20-22).

Employer-employee relationship : An employer-employee relationship exists when there is an agreement, which may be formal or informal, between an entity and an individual, normally entered into voluntarily by both parties, whereby the individual works for the entity in return for remuneration in cash or in kind ( BPM6, 11.11 ).

Employers : Employers are those workers who, working on their own account with one or more partners, hold the type of job defined as a "self-employment job" and, in this capacity, on a continuous basis (including the reference period) have engaged one or more persons to work for them in their business as "employee(s)" (ILO, Fifteenth ICLS, pp. 20-22).

Employment : Persons in employment are all persons above a specified age who, during a specified brief period, either one week or one day, were in paid employment or self-employment (OECD GST, p. 170).

Employment in tourism industries : Employment in tourism industries may be measured as a count of the persons employed in tourism industries in any of their jobs, as a count of the persons employed in tourism industries in their main job, or as a count of the jobs in tourism industries ( IRTS 2008, 7.9 ).

Enterprise : An enterprise is an institutional unit engaged in production of goods and/or services. It may be a corporation, a non-profit institution, or an unincorporated enterprise. Corporate enterprises and non-profit institutions are complete institutional units. An unincorporated enterprise, however, refers to an institutional unit —a household or government unit —only in its capacity as a producer of goods and services (OECD BD4, p. 232)

Establishment : An establishment is an enterprise, or part of an enterprise, that is situated in a single location and in which only a single productive activity is carried out or in which the principal productive activity accounts for most of the value added ( SNA 2008, 5.14 ).

Estimation : Estimation is concerned with inference about the numerical value of unknown population values from incomplete data such as a sample. If a single figure is calculated for each unknown parameter the process is called "point estimation". If an interval is calculated within which the parameter is likely, in some sense, to lie, the process is called "interval estimation".

Exports of goods and services : Exports of goods and services consist of sales, barter, or gifts or grants, of goods and services from residents to non-residents (OECD GST, p. 194)

Frame : A list, map or other specification of the units which define a population to be completely enumerated or sampled.

Forms of tourism : There are three basic forms of tourism: domestic tourism, inbound tourism, and outbound tourism. These can be combined in various ways to derive the following additional forms of tourism: internal tourism, national tourism and international tourism.

Gastronomy tourism :  Gastronomy tourism is a type of tourism activity which is characterized by the visitor's experience linked with food and related products and activities while travelling. Along with authentic, traditional, and/or innovative culinary experiences, Gastronomy Tourism may also involve other related activities such as visiting the local producers, participating in food festivals and attending cooking classes. Eno-tourism (wine tourism), as a sub-type of gastronomy tourism, refers to tourism whose purpose is visiting vineyards, wineries, tasting, consuming and/or purchasing wine, often at or near the source.

Goods : Goods are physical, produced objects for which a demand exists, over which ownership rights can be established and whose ownership can be transferred from one institutional unit to another by engaging in transactions on markets ( SNA 2008, p. 623 ).

Gross fixed capital formation : Gross fixed capital formation is defined as the value of institutional units' acquisitions less disposals of fixed assets. Fixed assets are produced assets (such as machinery, equipment, buildings or other structures) that are used repeatedly or continuously in production over several accounting periods (more than one year) ( SNA 2008, 1.52 ).

Gross margin : The gross margin of a provider of reservation services is the difference between the value at which the intermediated service is sold and the value accrued to the provider of reservation services for this intermediated service.

Gross value added : Gross value added is the value of output less the value of intermediate consumption ( TSA:RMF 2008, 3.32 ).

Gross value added of tourism industries : Gross value added of tourism industries (GVATI) is the total gross value added of all establishments belonging to tourism industries, regardless of whether all their output is provided to visitors and the degree of specialization of their production process ( TSA:RMF 2008, 4.86 ).

Grossing up : Activity aimed at transforming, based on statistical methodology, micro-data from samples into aggregate-level information representative of the target population.

Health tourism : Health tourism covers those types of tourism which have as a primary motivation, the contribution to physical, mental and/or spiritual health through medical and wellness-based activities which increase the capacity of individuals to satisfy their own needs and function better as individuals in their environment and society. Health tourism is the umbrella term for the subtypes wellness tourism and medical tourism.

Imputation : Procedure for entering a value for a specific data item where the response is missing or unusable.

Inbound tourism : Inbound tourism comprises the activities of a non-resident visitor within the country of reference on an inbound tourism trip ( IRTS 2008, 2.39 ).

Inbound tourism consumption : Inbound tourism consumption is the tourism consumption of a non-resident visitor within the economy of reference ( TSA:RMF 2008, figure 2.1 ).

Inbound tourism expenditure : Inbound tourism expenditure is the tourism expenditure of a non-resident visitor within the economy of reference ( IRTS 2008, 4.15(b) ).

Innovation in tourism : Innovation in tourism is the introduction of a new or improved component which intends to bring tangible and intangible benefits to tourism stakeholders and the local community, improve the value of the tourism experience and the core competencies of the tourism sector and hence enhance tourism competitiveness and /or sustainability. Innovation in tourism may cover potential areas, such as tourism destinations, tourism products, technology, processes, organizations and business models, skills, architecture, services, tools and/or practices for management, marketing, communication, operation, quality assurance and pricing.

Institutional sector : An aggregation of institutional units on the basis of the type of producer and depending on their principal activity and function, which are considered to be indicative of their economic behaviour.

Institutional unit : The elementary economic decision-making centre characterised by uniformity of behaviour and decision-making autonomy in the exercise of its principal function.

Intermediate consumption : Intermediate consumption consists of the value of the goods and services consumed as inputs by a process of production, excluding fixed assets whose consumption is recorded as consumption of fixed capital ( SNA 2008, 6.213 ).

Internal tourism : Internal tourism comprises domestic tourism and inbound tourism, that is to say, the activities of resident and non-resident visitors within the country of reference as part of domestic or international tourism trips ( IRTS 2008, 2.40(a) ).

Internal tourism consumption : Internal tourism consumption is the tourism consumption of both resident and non-resident visitors within the economy of reference. It is the sum of domestic tourism consumption and inbound tourism consumption ( TSA:RMF 2008, figure 2.1 ).

Internal tourism expenditure : Internal tourism expenditure comprises all tourism expenditure of visitors, both resident and non-resident, within the economy of reference. It is the sum of domestic tourism expenditure and inbound tourism expenditure. It includes acquisition of goods and services imported into the country of reference and sold to visitors. This indicator provides the most comprehensive measurement of tourism expenditure in the economy of reference ( IRTS 2008, 4.20(a) ).

International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities : The International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) consists of a coherent and consistent classification structure of economic activities based on a set of internationally agreed concepts, definitions, principles and classification rules. It provides a comprehensive framework within which economic data can be collected and reported in a format that is designed for purposes of economic analysis, decision-taking and policymaking. The classification structure represents a standard format to organize detailed information about the state of an economy according to economic principles and perceptions (ISIC, Rev.4, 1).

International tourism : International tourism comprises inbound tourism and outbound tourism, that is to say, the activities of resident visitors outside the country of reference, either as part of domestic or outbound tourism trips and the activities of non-resident visitors within the country of reference on inbound tourism trips ( IRTS 2008, 2.40(c) ).

International visitor : An international traveller qualifies as an international visitor with respect to the country of reference if: (a) he/she is on a tourism trip and (b) he/she is a non-resident travelling in the country of reference or a resident travelling outside of it ( IRTS 2008, 2.42 ).

Job : The agreement between an employee and the employer defines a job and each self-employed person has a job ( SNA 2008, 19.30 ).

Measurement error : Error in reading, calculating or recording numerical value.

Medical tourism : Medical tourism is a type of tourism activity which involves the use of evidence-based medical healing resources and services (both invasive and non-invasive). This may include diagnosis, treatment, cure, prevention and rehabilitation.

Meetings industry : To highlight purposes relevant to the meetings industry, if a trip's main purpose is business/professional, it can be further subdivided into "attending meetings, conferences or congresses, trade fairs and exhibitions" and "other business and professional purposes". The term meetings industry is preferred by the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA), Meeting Professionals International (MPI) and Reed Travel over the acronym MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions) which does not recognize the industrial nature of such activities.

Metadata : Data that defines and describes other data and processes.

MICE : See meetings industry.

Microdata : Non-aggregated observations, or measurements of characteristics of individual units.

Mirror statistics : Mirror statistics are used to conduct bilateral comparisons of two basic measures of a trade flow and are a traditional tool for detecting the causes of asymmetries in statistics (OECD GST, p. 335).

Mountain tourism : Mountain tourism is a type of tourism activity which takes place in a defined and limited geographical space such as hills or mountains with distinctive characteristics and attributes that are inherent to a specific landscape, topography, climate, biodiversity (flora and fauna) and local community. It encompasses a broad range of outdoor leisure and sports activities.

National tourism : National tourism comprises domestic tourism and outbound tourism, that is to say, the activities of resident visitors within and outside the country of reference, either as part of domestic or outbound tourism trips ( IRTS 2008, 2.40(b) ).

National tourism consumption : National tourism consumption is the tourism consumption of resident visitors, within and outside the economy of reference. It is the sum of domestic tourism consumption and outbound tourism consumption ( TSA:RMF 2008, figure 2.1 ).

National tourism expenditure : National tourism expenditure comprises all tourism expenditure of resident visitors within and outside the economy of reference. It is the sum of domestic tourism expenditure and outbound tourism expenditure ( IRTS 2008, 4.20(b) ).

Nationality : The concept of "country of residence" of a traveller is different from that of his/her nationality or citizenship ( IRTS 2008, 2.19 ).

Non-monetary indicators : Data measured in physical or other non-monetary units should not be considered a secondary part of a satellite account. They are essential components, both for the information they provide directly and in order to analyse the monetary data adequately ( SNA 2008, 29.84 ).

Observation unit : entity on which information is received and statistics are compiled.

Outbound tourism : Outbound tourism comprises the activities of a resident visitor outside the country of reference, either as part of an outbound tourism trip or as part of a domestic tourism trip ( IRTS 2008, 2.39(c) ).

Outbound tourism consumption : Outbound tourism consumption is the tourism consumption of a resident visitor outside the economy of reference ( TSA:RMF 2008, figure 2.1 ).

Outbound tourism expenditure : Outbound tourism expenditure is the tourism expenditure of a resident visitor outside the economy of reference ( IRTS 2008, 4.15(c) ).

Output : Output is defined as the goods and services produced by an establishment, a) excluding the value of any goods and services used in an activity for which the establishment does not assume the risk of using the products in production, and b) excluding the value of goods and services consumed by the same establishment except for goods and services used for capital formation (fixed capital or changes in inventories) or own final consumption ( SNA 2008, 6.89 ).

Output (main): The main output of a (productive) activity should be determined by reference to the value added of the goods sold or services rendered (ISIC rev.4, 114).

Pilot survey : The aim of a pilot survey is to test the questionnaire (pertinence of the questions, understanding of questions by those being interviewed, duration of the interview) and to check various potential sources for sampling and non-sampling errors: for instance, the place in which the surveys are carried out and the method used, the identification of any omitted answers and the reason for the omission, problems of communicating in various languages, translation, the mechanics of data collection, the organization of field work, etc.

Place of usual residence : The place of usual residence is the geographical place where the enumerated person usually resides, and is defined by the location of his/her principal dwelling (Principles and recommendations for population and housing censuses of the United Nations, 2.20 to 2.24).

Probability sample : A sample selected by a method based on the theory of probability (random process), that is, by a method involving knowledge of the likelihood of any unit being selected.

Production account : The production account records the activity of producing goods and services as defined within the SNA. Its balancing item, gross value added, is defined as the value of output less the value of intermediate consumption and is a measure of the contribution to GDP made by an individual producer, industry or sector. Gross value added is the source from which the primary incomes of the SNA are generated and is therefore carried forward into the primary distribution of income account. Value added and GDP may also be measured net by deducting consumption of fixed capital, a figure representing the decline in value during the period of the fixed capital used in a production process ( SNA 2008, 1.17 ).

Production : Economic production may be defined as an activity carried out under the control and responsibility of an institutional unit that uses inputs of labour, capital, and goods and services to produce outputs of goods or services ( SNA 2008, 6.24. ).

Purpose of a tourism trip (main): The main purpose of a tourism trip is defined as the purpose in the absence of which the trip would not have taken place ( IRTS 2008, 3.10. ). Classification of tourism trips according to the main purpose refers to nine categories: this typology allows the identification of different subsets of visitors (business visitors, transit visitors, etc.) See also destination of a tourism trip ( IRTS 2008, 3.14 ).

Quality of a tourism destination : Quality of a tourism destination is the result of a process which implies the satisfaction of all tourism product and service needs, requirements and expectations of the consumer at an acceptable price, in conformity with mutually accepted contractual conditions and the implicit underlying factors such as safety and security, hygiene, accessibility, communication, infrastructure and public amenities and services. It also involves aspects of ethics, transparency and respect towards the human, natural and cultural environment. Quality, as one of the key drivers of tourism competitiveness, is also a professional tool for organizational, operational and perception purposes for tourism suppliers.

Questionnaire and Questionnaire design : Questionnaire is a group or sequence of questions designed to elicit information on a subject, or sequence of subjects, from a reporting unit or from another producer of official statistics. Questionnaire design is the design (text, order, and conditions for skipping) of the questions used to obtain the data needed for the survey.

Reference period : The period of time or point in time to which the measured observation is intended to refer.

Relevance : The degree to which statistics meet current and potential users' needs.

Reliability : Closeness of the initial estimated value to the subsequent estimated value.

Reporting unit : Unit that supplies the data for a given survey instance, like a questionnaire or interview. Reporting units may, or may not, be the same as the observation unit.

Residents/non-residents : The residents of a country are individuals whose centre of predominant economic interest is located in its economic territory. For a country, the non-residents are individuals whose centre of predominant economic interest is located outside its economic territory.

Response and non-response : Response and non-response to various elements of a survey entail potential errors.

Response error : Response errors may be defined as those arising from the interviewing process. Such errors may be due to a number of circumstances, such as inadequate concepts or questions; inadequate training; interviewer failures; respondent failures.

Rural tourism : Rural tourism is a type of tourism activity in which the visitor's experience is related to a wide range of products generally linked to nature-based activities, agriculture, rural lifestyle / culture, angling and sightseeing. Rural tourism activities take place in non-urban (rural) areas with the following characteristics:

• Low population density;
• Landscape and land-use dominated by agriculture and forestry; and
• Traditional social structure and lifestyle

Same-day visitor (or excursionist): A visitor (domestic, inbound or outbound) is classified as a tourist (or overnight visitor), if his/her trip includes an overnight stay, or as a same-day visitor (or excursionist) otherwise ( IRTS 2008, 2.13 ).

Sample : A subset of a frame where elements are selected based on a process with a known probability of selection.

Sample survey : A survey which is carried out using a sampling method.

Sampling error : That part of the difference between a population value and an estimate thereof, derived from a random sample, which is due to the fact that only a subset of the population is enumerated.

Satellite accounts : There are two types of satellite accounts, serving two different functions. The first type, sometimes called an internal satellite, takes the full set of accounting rules and conventions of the SNA but focuses on a particular aspect of interest by moving away from the standard classifications and hierarchies. Examples are tourism, coffee production and environmental protection expenditure. The second type, called an external satellite, may add non-economic data or vary some of the accounting conventions or both. It is a particularly suitable way to explore new areas in a research context. An example may be the role of volunteer labour in the economy ( SNA 2008, 29.85 ).

SDMX, Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange : Set of technical standards and content-oriented guidelines, together with an IT architecture and tools, to be used for the efficient exchange and sharing of statistical data and metadata (SDMX).

Seasonal adjustment : Seasonal adjustment is a statistical technique to remove the effects of seasonal calendar influences on a series. Seasonal effects usually reflect the influence of the seasons themselves, either directly or through production series related to them, or social conventions. Other types of calendar variation occur as a result of influences such as number of days in the calendar period, the accounting or recording practices adopted or the incidence of moving holidays.

Self-employment job : Self-employment jobs are those jobs where remuneration is directly dependent upon the profits (or the potential of profits) derived from the goods or services produced.

Self-employed with paid employees : Self-employed with paid employees are classified as employers.

Self-employed without employees : Self-employed without employees are classified as own-account workers.

Services : Services are the result of a production activity that changes the conditions of the consuming units, or facilitates the exchange of products or financial assets. They cannot be traded separately from their production. By the time their production is completed, they must have been provided to the consumers ( SNA 2008, 6.17 ).

Social transfers in kind : A special case of transfers in kind is that of social transfers in kind. These consist of goods and services provided by general government and non-profit institutions serving households (NPISHs) that are delivered to individual households. Health and education services are the prime examples. Rather than provide a specified amount of money to be used to purchase medical and educational services, the services are often provided in kind to make sure that the need for the services is met. (Sometimes the recipient purchases the service and is reimbursed by the insurance or assistance scheme. Such a transaction is still treated as being in kind because the recipient is merely acting as the agent of the insurance scheme) (SNA 2008, 3.83).

Sports tourism : Sports tourism is a type of tourism activity which refers to the travel experience of the tourist who either observes as a spectator or actively participates in a sporting event generally involving commercial and non-commercial activities of a competitive nature.

Standard classification : Classifications that follow prescribed rules and are generally recommended and accepted.

Statistical error : The unknown difference between the retained value and the true value.

Statistical indicator : A data element that represents statistical data for a specified time, place, and other characteristics, and is corrected for at least one dimension (usually size) to allow for meaningful comparisons.

Statistical metadata : Data about statistical data.

Statistical unit : Entity about which information is sought and about which statistics are compiled. Statistical units may be identifiable legal or physical entities or statistical constructs.

Survey : An investigation about the characteristics of a given population by means of collecting data from a sample of that population and estimating their characteristics through the systematic use of statistical methodology.

System of National Accounts : The System of National Accounts (SNA) is the internationally agreed standard set of recommendations on how to compile measures of economic activity in accordance with strict accounting conventions based on economic principles. The recommendations are expressed in terms of a set of concepts, definitions, classifications and accounting rules that comprise the internationally agreed standard for measuring indicators of economic performance. The accounting framework of the SNA allows economic data to be compiled and presented in a format that is designed for purposes of economic analysis, decision-taking and policymaking ( SNA 2008, 1.1 ).

Total tourism internal demand : Total tourism internal demand, is the sum of internal tourism consumption, tourism gross fixed capital formation and tourism collective consumption ( TSA:RMF 2008, 4.114 ). It does not include outbound tourism consumption.

Tourism : Tourism refers to the activity of visitors ( IRTS 2008, 2.9 ).

Tourism characteristic activities : Tourism characteristic activities are the activities that typically produce tourism characteristic products. As the industrial origin of a product (the ISIC industry that produces it) is not a criterion for the aggregation of products within a similar CPC category, there is no strict one-to-one relationship between products and the industries producing them as their principal outputs ( IRTS 2008, 5.11 ).

Tourism characteristic products : Tourism characteristic products are those that satisfy one or both of the following criteria: a) Tourism expenditure on the product should represent a significant share total tourism expenditure (share-of-expenditure/demand condition); b) Tourism expenditure on the product should represent a significant share of the supply of the product in the economy (share-of-supply condition). This criterion implies that the supply of a tourism characteristic product would cease to exist in meaningful quantity in the absence of visitors ( IRTS 2008, 5.10 ).

Tourism connected products : Their significance within tourism analysis for the economy of reference is recognized although their link to tourism is very limited worldwide. Consequently, lists of such products will be country-specific ( IRTS 2008, 5.12 ).

Tourism consumption : Tourism consumption has the same formal definition as tourism expenditure. Nevertheless, the concept of tourism consumption used in the Tourism Satellite Account goes beyond that of tourism expenditure. Besides the amount paid for the acquisition of consumption goods and services, as well as valuables for own use or to give away, for and during tourism trips, which corresponds to monetary transactions (the focus of tourism expenditure), it also includes services associated with vacation accommodation on own account, tourism social transfers in kind and other imputed consumption. These transactions need to be estimated using sources different from information collected directly from the visitors, such as reports on home exchanges, estimations of rents associated with vacation homes, calculations of financial intermediation services indirectly measured (FISIM), etc. ( TSA:RMF 2008, 2.25 ).

Tourism destination : A tourism destination is a physical space with or without administrative and/or analytical boundaries in which a visitor can spend an overnight. It is the cluster (co-location) of products and services, and of activities and experiences along the tourism value chain and a basic unit of analysis of tourism. A destination incorporates various stakeholders and can network to form larger destinations. It is also intangible with its image and identity which may influence its market competitiveness.

Tourism direct gross domestic product : Tourism direct gross domestic product (TDGDP) is the sum of the part of gross value added (at basic prices) generated by all industries in response to internal tourism consumption plus the amount of net taxes on products and imports included within the value of this expenditure at purchasers' prices ( TSA:RMF 2008, 4.96 ).

Tourism direct gross value added : Tourism direct gross value added (TDGVA) is the part of gross value added generated by tourism industries and other industries of the economy that directly serve visitors in response to internal tourism consumption ( TSA:RMF 2008, 4.88 ).

Tourism expenditure : Tourism expenditure refers to the amount paid for the acquisition of consumption goods and services, as well as valuables, for own use or to give away, for and during tourism trips. It includes expenditures by visitors themselves, as well as expenses that are paid for or reimbursed by others ( IRTS 2008, 4.2 ).

Tourism industries : The tourism industries comprise all establishments for which the principal activity is a tourism characteristic activity. Tourism industries (also referred to as tourism activities) are the activities that typically producetourism characteristic products. The term tourism industries is equivalent to tourism characteristic activities and the two terms are sometimes used synonymously in the IRTS 2008, 5.10, 5.11 and figure 5.1 .

Tourism product : A tourism product is a combination of tangible and intangible elements, such as natural, cultural and man-made resources, attractions, facilities, services and activities around a specific center of interest which represents the core of the destination marketing mix and creates an overall visitor experience including emotional aspects for the potential customers. A tourism product is priced and sold through distribution channels and it has a life-cycle.

Tourism ratio : For each variable of supply in the Tourism Satellite Account, the tourism ratiois the ratio between the total value of tourism share and total value of the corresponding variable in the Tourism Satellite Account expressed in percentage form ( TSA:RMF 2008, 4.56 ). (See also Tourism share).

Tourism Satellite Account : The Tourism Satellite Account is the second international standard on tourism statistics (Tourism Satellite Account: Recommended Methodological Framework 2008 –TSA:RMF 2008) that has been developed in order to present economic data relative to tourism within a framework of internal and external consistency with the rest of the statistical system through its link to the System of National Accounts. It is the basic reconciliation framework of tourism statistics. As a statistical tool for the economic accounting of tourism, the TSA can be seen as a set of 10 summary tables, each with their underlying data and representing a different aspect of the economic data relative to tourism: inbound, domestic tourism and outbound tourism expenditure, internal tourism expenditure, production accounts of tourism industries, the Gross Value Added (GVA) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) attributable to tourism demand, employment, investment, government consumption, and non-monetary indicators.

Tourism Satellite Account aggregates : The compilation of the following aggregates, which represent a set of relevant indicators of the size of tourism in an economy is recommended ( TSA:RMF 2008, 4.81 ):

• Internal tourism expenditure;
• Internal tourism consumption;
• Gross value added of tourism industries (GVATI);
• Tourism direct gross value added (TDGVA);
• Tourism direct gross domestic product (TDGDP).

Tourism sector : The tourism sector, as contemplated in the TSA, is the cluster of production units in different industries that provide consumption goods and services demanded by visitors. Such industries are called tourism industries because visitor acquisition represents such a significant share of their supply that, in the absence of visitors, their production of these would cease to exist in meaningful quantity.

Tourism share : Tourism share is the share of the corresponding fraction of internal tourism consumption in each component of supply ( TSA:RMF 2008, 4.51 ). For each industry, the tourism share of output (in value), is the sum of the tourism share corresponding to each product component of its output ( TSA:RMF 2008, 4.55 ). (See also Tourism ratio ).

Tourism single-purpose consumer durable goods : Tourism single-purpose consumer durables is a specific category of consumer durable goods that include durable goods that are used exclusively, or almost exclusively, by individuals while on tourism trips ( TSA:RMF 2008 , 2.41 and Annex 5 ).

Tourism trip : Trips taken by visitors are tourism trips ( IRTS 2008, 2.29 ).

Tourist (or overnight visitor): A visitor (domestic, inbound or outbound) is classified as a tourist (or overnight visitor), if his/her trip includes an overnight stay, or as a same-day visitor (or excursionist) otherwise ( IRTS 2008, 2.13 ).

Tourism value chain : The tourism value chain is the sequence of primary and support activities which are strategically fundamental for the performance of the tourism sector. Linked processes such as policy making and integrated planning, product development and packaging, promotion and marketing, distribution and sales and destination operations and services are the key primary activities of the tourism value chain. Support activities involve transport and infrastructure, human resource development, technology and systems development and other complementary goods and services which may not be related to core tourism businesses but have a high impact on the value of tourism.

Travel / traveller : Travel refers to the activity of travellers. A traveller is someone who moves between different geographic locations, for any purpose and any duration ( IRTS 2008, 2.4 ). The visitor is a particular type of traveller and consequently tourism is a subset of travel.

Travel group : A travel group is made up of individuals or travel parties travelling together: examples are people travelling on the same package tour or youngsters attending a summer camp ( IRTS 2008, 3.5 ).

Travel item (in balance of payments): Travel is an item of the goods and services account of the balance of payments: travel credits cover goods and services for own use or to give away acquired from an economy by non-residents during visits to that economy. Travel debits cover goods and services for own use or to give away acquired from other economies by residents during visits to other economies ( BPM6, 10.86 ).

Travel party : A travel party is defined as visitors travelling together on a trip and whose expenditures are pooled ( IRTS 2008, 3.2 ).

Trip : A trip refers to the travel by a person from the time of departure from his/her usual residence until he/she returns: it thus refers to a round trip. Trips taken by visitors are tourism trips.

Urban/city tourism : Urban/city tourism is a type of tourism activity which takes place in an urban space with its inherent attributes characterized by non-agricultural based economy such as administration, manufacturing, trade and services and by being nodal points of transport. Urban/city destinations offer a broad and heterogeneous range of cultural, architectural, technological, social and natural experiences and products for leisure and business.

Usual environment: The usual environment of an individual, a key concept in tourism, is defined as the geographical area (though not necessarily a contiguous one) within which an individual conducts his/her regular life routines ( IRTS 2008, 2.21 ).

Usual residence : The place of usual residence is the geographical place where the enumerated person usually resides (Principles and recommendations for population and housing censuses of the United Nations, 2.16 to 2.18).

Vacation home : A vacation home (sometimes also designated as a holiday home) is a secondary dwelling that is visited by the members of the household mostly for purposes of recreation, vacation or any other form of leisure ( IRTS 2008, 2.27 ).

Valuables : Valuables are produced goods of considerable value that are not used primarily for purposes of production or consumption but are held as stores of value over time ( SNA 2008, 10.13 ).

Visit : A trip is made up of visits to different places.The term "tourism visit" refers to a stay in a place visited during a tourism trip ( IRTS 2008, 2.7 and 2.33 ).

Visitor : A visitor is a traveller taking a trip to a main destination outside his/her usual environment, for less than a year, for any main purpose (business, leisure or other personal purpose) other than to be employed by a resident entity in the country or place visited ( IRTS 2008, 2.9 ). A visitor (domestic, inbound or outbound) is classified as a tourist (or overnight visitor), if his/her trip includes an overnight stay, or as a same-day visitor (or excursionist) otherwise ( IRTS 2008, 2.13 ).

Wellness tourism : Wellness tourism is a type of tourism activity which aims to improve and balance all of the main domains of human life including physical, mental, emotional, occupational, intellectual and spiritual. The primary motivation for the wellness tourist is to engage in preventive, proactive, lifestyle-enhancing activities such as fitness, healthy eating, relaxation, pampering and healing treatments.

• Travel, Tourism & Hospitality ›

Leisure Travel

Digitalization of the travel industry - statistics & facts

What are the most visited travel websites, the impact of social media on travel, key insights.

Detailed statistics

Online travel market size worldwide 2017-2028

Distribution of sales channels in the travel and tourism market worldwide 2019-2029

Travel & leisure industry digital advertising share in selected global countries 2023

Editor’s Picks Current statistics on this topic

Online Travel Market

Most popular travel and tourism websites worldwide 2024

Further recommended statistics

Digital marketing in the travel industry.

• Premium Statistic Distribution of sales channels in the travel and tourism market worldwide 2019-2029
• Premium Statistic Travel & leisure industry digital advertising share in selected global countries 2023
• Premium Statistic In-app advertising spending worldwide 2023, by industry
• Premium Statistic Spending on Google of leading online travel agencies (OTAs) worldwide 2019-2024
• Premium Statistic Google spending as a share of marketing expenses of leading OTAs worldwide 2019-2024
• Premium Statistic GoogleAds average monthly CPC for travel worldwide 2023, by country
• Premium Statistic Industries with highest share of digital ad spend in the U.S. 2023
• Premium Statistic Most influential aspects of trip advertising among global travelers 2023

Revenue share of sales channels of the travel and tourism market worldwide from 2019 to 2029

Travel & leisure industry digital advertising share in selected global countries 2023

Travel and leisure industry share of digital advertising spending in selected countries worldwide in 2023

In-app advertising spending worldwide 2023, by industry

In-app advertising spending worldwide in 2023, by industry (in billion U.S. dollars)

Spending on Google of leading online travel agencies (OTAs) worldwide 2019-2024

Estimated expenditure on Google advertising of leading online travel agencies (OTAs) worldwide from 2019 to 2023, with a forecast for 2024 (in million U.S. dollars)

Google spending as a share of marketing expenses of leading OTAs worldwide 2019-2024

Estimated Google advertising spending as a share of marketing expenses of leading online travel agencies (OTAs) worldwide from 2019 to 2023, with a forecast for 2024

GoogleAds average monthly CPC for travel worldwide 2023, by country

Average cost-per-click (CPC) in Google Ads search advertising for travel in selected countries worldwide in May 2023 (in U.S. dollars)

Industries with highest share of digital ad spend in the U.S. 2023

Industries with highest share of digital advertising spending in the United States in 2023

Most influential aspects of trip advertising among global travelers 2023

Most influential aspects of trip advertising among travelers worldwide as of April 2023

Travel websites

• Premium Statistic Most popular travel and tourism websites worldwide 2024
• Premium Statistic Total visits to travel and tourism website booking.com worldwide 2024
• Premium Statistic Share of visits to the travel website booking.com worldwide 2024, by country
• Premium Statistic Total visits to travel and tourism website tripadvisor.com worldwide 2024
• Premium Statistic Share of visits to the travel website tripadvisor.com worldwide 2024, by country
• Premium Statistic Number of user reviews and ratings on Tripadvisor worldwide 2014-2023
• Premium Statistic ACSI - U.S. customer satisfaction with online travel websites as of 2024

Most visited travel and tourism websites worldwide in August 2024 (in million visits)

Total visits to travel and tourism website booking.com worldwide 2024

Estimated total number of visits to the travel and tourism website booking.com worldwide from March to August 2024 (in millions)

Share of visits to the travel website booking.com worldwide 2024, by country

Share of visits to the travel and tourism website booking.com worldwide in August 2024, by country

Total visits to travel and tourism website tripadvisor.com worldwide 2024

Estimated total number of visits to the travel and tourism website tripadvisor.com worldwide from March to August 2024 (in millions)

Share of visits to the travel website tripadvisor.com worldwide 2024, by country

Share of visits to the travel and tourism website tripadvisor.com worldwide in August 2024, by country

Number of user reviews and ratings on Tripadvisor worldwide 2014-2023

Total number of user reviews and ratings on Tripadvisor worldwide from 2014 to 2023 (in millions)

ACSI - U.S. customer satisfaction with online travel websites as of 2024

U.S. customer satisfaction with online travel websites from 2000 to 2024 (index score)

Online travel planning and booking

• Premium Statistic Main resources for trip inspiration used by global travelers 2023
• Premium Statistic Main resources for trip inspiration used by travelers worldwide 2023, by country
• Premium Statistic Main resources used before purchasing trips by travelers worldwide 2023
• Premium Statistic Importance to book a trip fully online among travelers worldwide 2023, by generation
• Premium Statistic Travel product online bookings in the U.S. 2024
• Premium Statistic Travel product online bookings in Canada 2024
• Premium Statistic Travel product online bookings in the UK 2024
• Premium Statistic Most searched travel terms on Google in the UK 2022-2023
• Premium Statistic Leading holiday travel provider websites in the UK Q1 2024, by share of voice

Main resources for trip inspiration used by global travelers 2023

Main resources used for trip inspiration by travelers worldwide as of April 2023

Main resources for trip inspiration used by travelers worldwide 2023, by country

Main resources used for trip inspiration by travelers worldwide as of October 2023, by country

Main resources used before purchasing trips by travelers worldwide 2023

Main resources used before purchasing a trip by travelers worldwide as of April 2023

Importance to book a trip fully online among travelers worldwide 2023, by generation

Share of travelers who think it is important to be able to book their trip entirely online worldwide as of July 2023, by generation

Travel product online bookings in the U.S. 2024

Travel product online bookings in the U.S. as of June 2024

Travel product online bookings in Canada 2024

Travel product online bookings in Canada as of June 2024

Travel product online bookings in the UK 2024

Travel product online bookings in the UK as of June 2024

Most searched travel terms on Google in the UK 2022-2023

Volume of Google search for travel-related terms in the United Kingdom (UK) from November 2022 to April 2023

Leading holiday travel provider websites in the UK Q1 2024, by share of voice

Leading websites for holiday searches in the United Kingdom in 1st quarter of 2024, by share of voice

Social media

• Premium Statistic Travel and tourism comments on social media worldwide 2019-2023, by product type
• Premium Statistic Digital media importance among DMOs worldwide September 2023
• Premium Statistic Important digital transformation topics among accommodation businesses in Europe 2023
• Premium Statistic Facebook brand post engagement 2023, by vertical
• Premium Statistic Instagram brand post engagement 2023, by vertical
• Premium Statistic X/Twitter brand post engagement 2023, by vertical
• Premium Statistic Key data on leading TikTok travel influencers worldwide 2024
• Premium Statistic Most popular travel destinations on TikTok worldwide 2024, by number of posts
• Premium Statistic Most talked about products/topics online in the U.S. 2024
• Premium Statistic Most talked about products/topics online in the UK 2024

Travel and tourism comments on social media worldwide 2019-2023, by product type

Share of travel and tourism comments on social media worldwide in 2019 and 2023, by type of product

Digital media importance among DMOs worldwide September 2023

Perceived importance of digital media among destination marketing organizations (DMOs) worldwide as of September 2023

Important digital transformation topics among accommodation businesses in Europe 2023

Most important digital transformation topics among accommodation businesses in Europe as of May 2023

Facebook brand post engagement 2023, by vertical

Average engagement rate with brand posts on Facebook in 2023, by vertical

Instagram brand post engagement 2023, by vertical

Average engagement rate with brand posts on Instagram in 2023, by vertical

X/Twitter brand post engagement 2023, by vertical

Average engagement rate with brand posts on X (formerly Twitter) in 2023, by vertical

Key data on leading TikTok travel influencers worldwide 2024

Key figures on leading TikTok travel influencers worldwide as of May 2024

Most popular travel destinations on TikTok worldwide 2024, by number of posts

Most popular travel destinations on TikTok worldwide as of May 2024, by number of posts (in millions)

Most talked about products/topics online in the U.S. 2024

Most talked about products/topics online in the U.S. as of June 2024

Most talked about products/topics online in the UK 2024

Most talked about products/topics online in the UK as of June 2024

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