article · Sustainability
Digitalisation is increasingly utilised to promote sustainability within tourist destinations, reflecting an expanding area of academic investigation. An analysis of literature published between 2012 and 2022 highlights a steady growth in research exploring this intersection. The primary concepts driving this field include smart tourism, digital technologies, smart cities, social media, big data, and destination marketing, alongside considerations stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. These digital assets, particularly data analytics, online platforms, and smart technologies, provide avenues to bolster sustainable practices. However, integrating technology into destination management involves clear operational challenges. Overcoming these barriers requires effective collaboration across diverse stakeholders, careful handling of data privacy issues, and conscious mitigation of the digital divide.
Tourist destinations face increasing pressure to balance environmental and economic sustainability with modern visitor expectations. Mapping how digital tools such as data analytics and smart technologies intersect with sustainability helps planners and industry stakeholders identify practical mechanisms for destination management, while highlighting persistent barriers such as digital exclusion and privacy risks.
Because this study is a bibliometric literature review, it does not evaluate or present a specific technology ready for commercial deployment. However, it indicates that smart technologies, data analytics, and online platforms represent high-interest application areas for destination management organisations and tourism operators. Real-world adoption remains tied to overcoming systemic challenges, specifically data privacy safeguards, digital divide barriers, and multi-stakeholder coordination.
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Sustainability has become a key consideration for tourist destinations, and digitalization is increasingly being used as a tool to enhance sustainable tourism development. This paper aims to map the intersection between sustainability and digitalization in tourist destinations using a bibliometric analysis. The study is based on a bibliometric analysis of the existing literature in academic journals, conference proceedings, and books published between 2012 and 2022 from the Scopus database. Biblioshiny is used to visualize data. The results show that there is a growing interest in the convergence of sustainability and digitalization in tourist destinations, with an increasing number of publications in recent years. The co-occurrence analysis identified key themes and concepts such as sustainable tourism, digital technologies, smart tourism, social media, big data, smart city, COVID-19, digital marketing, and destination marketing. The study also highlights the different ways in which digitalization is being used to enhance sustainability in tourist destinations, including the use of smart technologies, data analytics, social media, and online platforms. However, the study also identified challenges and limitations to the integration of sustainability and digitalization, such as the need for stakeholder collaboration, data privacy concerns, and the potential for a digital divide.
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DOI: 10.3390/su15129717
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