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Meta-analysis of tourism sustainability research: 2019–2021.

1. Introduction

1.1. conceptual background, 1.1.1. sustainability, 1.1.2. sustainability under each of the four pillars of sustainability, 2. materials and methods, 3.1. geographic location of articles, 3.2. research approach of articles, 3.3. main topic of articles, 4. discussion, 4.1. social, 4.2. institutional, 4.3. ecological, 4.4. economic, 5. conclusions, implications, and future research, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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• Hsu, C.; Chen, M.; Nyaupane, G.; Shin-Huei, L. Measuring sustainable tourism attitude scale (SUS-TAS) in an Eastern Island context. Tour. Manag. Perspect. 2019 , 33 , 100617. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]

Click here to enlarge figure

Journal (n = 39)	Total Published: 2019–2021	Articles Using “Sustainability” Keyword	Articles Using All Keywords	Articles Used in this Study (n = 881)
1. International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research	92	19	18	4
2. Tourism Analysis	151	9	9	3
3. Tourism Review International	59	7	7	2
4. Tourist Studies	94	21	21	4
5. Journal of Tourism Futures	137	34	27	4
6. International Journal of Tourism Cities	106	16	16	2
7. Journal of Sport and Tourism	28	10	6	0
8. European Journal of Tourism Research	153	5	4	1
9. Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes	217	77	54	14
10. Journal of China Tourism Research	54	10	7	0
11. International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage	135	4	4	1
12. Tourism in Marine Environments	59	8	8	2
13. Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing	196	54	11	5
14. Journal of Sustainable Tourism	552	307	307	288
15. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism	102	27	25	8
16. Tourism Planning and Development	180	38	38	13
17. Journal of Ecotourism	109	29	17	4
18. Tourism Recreation Research	277	38	36	7
19. Journal of Travel Research	295	249	46	19
20. Journal of Environmental Management and Tourism	282	81	36	9
21. Annals of Tourism Research	243	148	11	7
22. Current Issues in Tourism	661	31	25	16
23. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research	162	17	15	6
24. International Journal of Tourism Research	224	20	8	8
25. Tourism Review	177	91	91	9
26. Tourism and Hospitality Research	98	7	7	6
27. Journal of Vacation Marketing	85	21	21	6
28. Tourism Economics	191	18	18	11
29. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management	333	43	31	14
30. Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research	263	9	7	1
31. International Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Administration	67	0	0	0
32. Tourism Management Perspectives	368	50	44	8
33. Tourism Geographies	113	23	22	5
34. Tourism and Hospitality Management	83	19	14	3
35. Advances in Hospitality and Tourism Research	52	1	1	1
36. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events	71	2	2	1
37. International Journal of Tourism Policy	52	3	3	3
38. Tourism Management	497	60	50	12
39. Sustainability	29,504	7640	425	374

Characteristics	n (%)
2019	193 (21.9)
2020	325 (36.9)
2021	363 (41.2)
North America	57 (6.5)
South America	32 (3.6)
Europe	406 (46.1)
Asia	201 (22.8)
Africa/Australia	119 (13.5)
Other	66 (7.5)
Qualitative	323 (36.7)
Quantitative	368 (41.8)
Mixed Methods	141 (16)
Review	49 (5.6)

Pillar and Categories	# and % of Articles within Pillar	Definition
= 300)
Tourist’s knowledge, behaviors, and education	74 (24.7)	Assessment of Tourist’s knowledge of, behaviors toward, and education of sustainability
Food, events, and festivals	42 (14.0)	Sustainability practices of and their impact on tourism food, events, and festivals
Collaboration and social impact	35 (11.7)	Communications, co-creation, and the tools used to connect individual concerning sustainability and its impact
Residents’ perspective	35 (11.7)	Local residents’ perspective of tourism and sustainable practices
Community-based operations	32 (10.7)	Sustainability approaches taken by local residents to encourage tourism within their community
Cultural, religion, and political	21 (7.0)	Influence of culture, religion, and politics toward sustainability practices
Gender and demographic characteristics	19 (6.3)	Intersection of gender, age, and economic status influencing sustainable tourism
Small entrepreneurs	18 (6.0)	Perspectives of small operators and accommodations regarding sustainable tourism
Social responsibility, equity, and justice	16 (5.3)	The role equality, diversity, and fairness play in sustainable practices utilized in the tourism industry
Corporate social strategies	8 (2.7)	Social impact large tourism corporations make using sustainable approaches
= 107)
Heritage sites and national parks	52 (48.6)	Sustainability practices and their impacts on landmark areas (heritage sites and national parks)
Policy and governance	25 (23.4)	Local, national, and global governmental sustainability policies, and their outcomes
Organizational goals and practices	20 (18.7)	Regional organizational tactics on sustainability to encourage tourism
Certifications and regulations	10 (9.3)	Sustainability of tourism destinations and the impact of certifications and regulations
= 277)
Development strategies and supply chain	109 (39.4)	Sustainability approaches and objectives affecting supply of deliverables and services in the tourism industry
Operational practices and management	92 (33.2)	Various sustainability tactics and their economic impact for operations
Technology and innovation	28 (10.1)	Impact of technology and innovative approaches on sustainability in tourism
COVID-19 Pandemic	24 (8.7)	Influence of COVID-19 pandemic on sustainable practices in tourism
Rural locations	13 (4.7)	Economic impacts that sustainable practices have on rural areas
Competition and job market	11 (4.0)	Occupation-based understanding of sustainability within tourism
= 181)
Energy consumption and climate change	60 (33.1)	Impact of various forms of energy consumption and sustainable practices effecting climate change
Conservation and development strategies	54 (29.8)	Environmental preservation utilizing sustainable strategies
Carbon emission and air quality	21 (11.6)	Impact of carbon emissions and air quality on tourism and sustainability
Overtourism	20 (11.0)	Overcrowding and impact of tourism on sustainability
Transportation and space	16 (8.8)	Various forms of transport and their influence within tourism
Food security	14 (7.7)	Sustainable approaches to investigate or ensure food security
= 16)
Measurement development and model creation	16 (100)	Various methods to develop models and instruments to measure sustainability within the tourism industry

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Roberts, C.; Reynolds, J.; Dolasinski, M.J. Meta-Analysis of Tourism Sustainability Research: 2019–2021. Sustainability 2022 , 14 , 3303. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14063303

Roberts C, Reynolds J, Dolasinski MJ. Meta-Analysis of Tourism Sustainability Research: 2019–2021. Sustainability . 2022; 14(6):3303. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14063303

Roberts, Chris, Joel Reynolds, and Mary Jo Dolasinski. 2022. "Meta-Analysis of Tourism Sustainability Research: 2019–2021" Sustainability 14, no. 6: 3303. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14063303

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

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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200+ Best Tourism Research Topics Ideas For College Students

“Interested in Tourism Research Topics for College Students? Tourism involves exploring different places, and it’s a popular subject for college studies. There are many exciting topics for students to research, like how we can travel responsibly, preserving cultural heritage, and how technology affects our travel experiences.

In this article, we’ll discuss various interesting research topic ideas for college students. Whether it’s about sustainable travel, keeping traditions alive, or how places are promoted to visitors, there’s a lot to discover. Let’s explore these topics together and see how they can help us understand the world of tourism better.

Table of Contents

What Is Tourism Research Topics?

Tourism research covers a lot of ground. Students and experts study different tourism topics to get a handle on how travel and hospitality work and how we can make them better. Some specific topics people dig into:

• How can we make tourism greener and more sustainable? This includes looking at the environmental impact of flights, cruise ships, hotels, etc.
• Cultural tourism – like understanding how tourism affects local arts, traditions, ways of life positively and negatively.
• Medical tourism – people traveling for cheaper healthcare.
• Adventure tourism – researching the thrill-seeking niche.
• Hospitality management – running hotels, airport logistics, etc. Behind the scenes.
• Marketing destinations and travel deals.
• Jobs and money – how tourism boosts or harms local economies.
• Tourism laws and policies – smart regulations?
• How technology is changing tourism – apps, VR trips, automation.

Basically, tourism research helps us get tourism. From green dream trips to mega resorts. Students pick topics to dive deep into all aspects of this giant industry and recommend future improvements. The goal is to pick up knowledge that helps people in the real world.

How Do I Find The Right Tourism Research Topics Ideas For College Students?

Here are some tips for college students on finding good travel and tourism research topic ideas:

1. Think About Your Interests

• What aspects of tourism are you most passionate about? Sustainability? Cultural preservation? Economics? Identify your interests first.

2. Look at Emerging Tourism Trends

• Explore rising issues like over-tourism, technology, and health and wellness trips. Researching a hot topic can be highly relevant.

3. Consult the Experts

• Ask your professors, librarians, and department advisors about gaps in current research. Finding an understudied niche can lead to great opportunities.

4. Scan Academic Journals

• Look at recent journals to see tourism topics other scholars are investigating. This can provide inspiration.

5. Consider Accessibility

• Can you realistically research this topic based on your location, budget, and resources? Localized tourism allows for interviews, surveys, and site visits.

6. Define a Specific Focus

• “Sustainable Tourism Strategies in Jamaica” is better than “Sustainability in Tourism.” Dig into a particular, well-defined angle.

7. Search Tourism Example Research Topics

• Look at other schools’ research prompts and samples for ideas. Discover what issues scholars tackle.

8. Make it Interdisciplinary

• Combine tourism with disciplines like business, anthropology, or communications for intriguing intersections.

What Are Some Good Topics Related To Tourism And Hospitality For My Thesis?

Here are some potential thesis topics related to tourism and hospitality presented in a table format:

Thesis Topic	Focus
Strategies for sustainable restaurant practices	Sustainability in hospitality
Training programs to support indigenous tour guiding	Cultural tourism
Economic impacts of medical tourism in Latin America	Medical tourism
Risk management for adventure tourism operators	Adventure tourism
Addressing labor shortages in the hospitality industry	Hospitality management
Accessibility practices in boutique hotels	Hospitality & disability studies
Digital marketing strategies for tourism boards	Tourism marketing
Overtourism: Causes, implications, and solutions	Sustainable tourism
Wellness tourism opportunities in Southeast Asia	Market research
COVID-19 transformational impacts on the cruise industry	Hospitality & crisis management

List of 200+ Best Tourism Research Topics Ideas For College Students

Here are the tourism research topics ideas for college students:

Sustainable Tourism Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Sustainable tourism practices and their impact on local economies
• Ecotourism: Balancing conservation and visitor experience
• Green initiatives in the hotel industry: A case study analysis
• Community-based tourism for sustainable development
• The role of government policies in promoting sustainable tourism
• Assessing the carbon footprint of popular tourist destinations
• Wildlife conservation and its influence on tourism strategies
• Sustainable transportation in the tourism sector
• The economic benefits of sustainable tourism in developing countries
• Evaluating the effectiveness of eco-certifications in the tourism industry

Cultural Tourism Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Impact of cultural festivals on tourism in different regions
• Heritage tourism: Preserving the past for future generations
• Cultural exchange programs and their contribution to tourism
• Role of museums and galleries in promoting cultural tourism
• Cultural diversity and its influence on tourist preferences
• The impact of indigenous tourism on local communities
• Revitalization of cultural heritage sites for tourism purposes
• Cultural differences in tourist behavior: A cross-cultural analysis
• The role of technology in preserving and promoting cultural heritage
• Religious tourism: Pilgrimages and their significance in the modern era

Medical Tourism Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Factors influencing the growth of medical tourism
• The impact of globalization on medical tourism trends
• Quality assessment in international healthcare services for medical tourists
• The role of advertising in attracting medical tourists to specific destinations
• Ethical considerations in medical tourism: A case study approach
• Economic implications of medical tourism for destination countries
• Integrating traditional and modern medicine in medical tourism destinations
• Medical tourism and its effect on local healthcare infrastructure
• Patient satisfaction in medical tourism: A comparative study
• Legal and regulatory challenges in the medical tourism industry

Adventure Tourism Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Risk management in adventure tourism activities
• Extreme sports tourism: Trends and challenges
• Adventure tourism and its impact on local ecosystems
• Psychological aspects of adventure tourism: A case study approach
• Adventure tourism marketing strategies in the digital age
• Cultural sensitivity in adventure tourism: A comparative analysis
• Community involvement in the development of adventure tourism destinations
• The role of technology in enhancing the adventure tourism experience
• Adventure tourism and its potential for community empowerment
• Adventure tourism and the concept of responsible travel

Dark Tourism Research Paper Topics & Ideas For College Students

• Motivations of Tourists Visiting Dark Tourism Sites
• Ethical considerations in dark tourism: A critical analysis
• Dark tourism and its impact on local communities
• The role of media in shaping perceptions of dark tourism destinations
• Historical preservation vs. commercialization in dark tourism
• Visitor experiences at war memorial sites: A comparative study
• Dark tourism and the representation of traumatic events
• The impact of guided tours on the interpretation of dark tourism sites
• Psychosocial effects of dark tourism on visitors
• Tourism and the commemoration of tragic events: A global perspective

Hospitality Management Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Trends in Hotel management: A Case Study Analysis
• The impact of online reviews on hotel bookings
• Employee satisfaction in the hospitality industry
• Technology adoption in hospitality services: Challenges and opportunities
• Sustainable practices in hotel operations
• The role of leadership in ensuring quality service in hotels
• Customer loyalty programs in the hospitality sector
• Impact of COVID-19 on the hospitality industry: A case study approach
• Innovations in hotel design and architecture
• Cross-cultural communication in the Hospitality Workforce

Tourism Marketing Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Digital marketing strategies for tourism destinations
• Social media influence on travel decision-making
• Destination branding: A case study of successful campaigns
• The role of influencers in promoting tourist destinations
• Event marketing and its impact on tourism
• Sustainable tourism marketing: Communicating green initiatives
• Niche tourism markets: Identifying and targeting specific segments
• Cultural sensitivity in international tourism marketing
• The impact of celebrity endorsements on destination popularity
• The role of technology in personalized tourism marketing

Economic Impact of Tourism Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Economic benefits of mega-events for host cities
• Tourism as a catalyst for rural economic development
• The role of small businesses in the tourism supply chain
• Economic diversification through tourism in developing countries
• The impact of tourism on income distribution in local communities
• Tourism taxation and its effects on destination competitiveness
• The role of infrastructure development in attracting tourism investments
• Economic resilience of tourist destinations in times of crisis
• Measuring the economic impact of cultural events on tourism
• Economic indicators and their correlation with tourism growth

Tourism Policy and Planning Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Analyzing the effectiveness of national tourism policies
• Community involvement in tourism planning and decision-making
• Tourism master plans and their implementation challenges
• Sustainable tourism development in protected areas
• Crisis management in tourism: Lessons from past events
• The role of public-private partnerships in tourism development
• Urban planning and its impact on tourism in major cities
• The influence of global events on destination planning
• Accessibility and its role in tourism destination development
• Stakeholder collaboration in regional tourism planning

Tourism and Technology Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Augmented reality in enhancing tourist experiences
• The role of artificial intelligence in personalized travel recommendations
• Big data analytics in tourism: Challenges and opportunities
• The impact of virtual reality on destination marketing
• Smart tourism destinations: Integrating technology for sustainable growth
• Blockchain technology in improving tourism security
• Mobile applications and their role in enhancing the tourist experience
• Online travel agencies and their impact on traditional tourism businesses
• The role of chatbots in customer service in the tourism industry
• Social media analytics for measuring tourism destination popularity

Tourism and Climate Change Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Climate change adaptation strategies for coastal tourism destinations
• Carbon offset programs in the travel industry
• The impact of climate change on winter tourism
• Sustainable transportation and its role in reducing tourism-related emissions
• Climate change awareness among tourists: A global perspective
• Green infrastructure in tourism destinations to mitigate climate change effects
• The role of tourism in raising awareness about climate change
• Sustainable energy practices in the hospitality sector
• Climate change and its influence on tourist behavior
• Policy measures for climate-resilient tourism development

Tourism Education and Training Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Curriculum development for tourism and hospitality programs
• The role of experiential learning in tourism education
• Internship programs and their impact on student preparedness for the industry
• The effectiveness of online learning in tourism education
• Industry-academia collaboration in shaping tourism curricula
• Soft skills development for success in the tourism sector
• Role of mentorship in career development in the tourism industry
• Diversity and inclusion in tourism education
• Lifelong learning in the ever-evolving tourism industry
• Bridging the gap between academia and industry in tourism education

Tourism and Cross-Cultural Communication Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Language barriers and their impact on tourist experiences
• Cultural sensitivity in tourism marketing materials
• Cross-cultural communication challenges in the hospitality sector
• Cultural exchange programs and their influence on intercultural understanding
• Role of interpreters in enhancing cross-cultural communication in tourism
• The impact of cultural training for tourism professionals
• Addressing stereotypes in cross-cultural interactions in tourism
• Cross-cultural negotiation in the tourism industry
• Tourist expectations and cross-cultural encounters
• Cultural adaptation strategies for tourism businesses in foreign markets

Tourism and Risk Management Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Crisis communication in the tourism industry
• Risk assessment in adventure tourism activities
• Emergency preparedness in tourist destinations
• The role of insurance in mitigating tourism-related risks
• Crisis management and its impact on destination image
• Cybersecurity threats in the tourism sector
• Health and safety standards in the tourism industry
• Natural disaster preparedness for tourist destinations
• The psychological impact of perceived risks on tourist behavior
• Legal aspects of risk management in the tourism industry

Tourism and Social Media Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Influencer marketing in the tourism industry
• The impact of user-generated content on destination perception
• Social media and crisis communication in the tourism sector
• Instagrammability and its influence on travel decisions
• The role of social media in promoting sustainable tourism practices
• Online reputation management for tourist destinations
• Social media analytics for measuring destination competitiveness
• The use of virtual tours on social media platforms
• Hashtag campaigns and their effectiveness in destination marketing
• The influence of online communities on travel behavior

Accessible Tourism Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Inclusive tourism: Addressing the needs of travelers with disabilities
• Accessible transportation options for tourists with mobility challenges
• Universal design in tourism infrastructure
• The role of technology in enhancing accessibility for tourists
• Inclusive marketing strategies for accessible tourism destinations
• Training programs for tourism professionals on accommodating diverse needs
• Legal frameworks and regulations for accessible tourism
• Accessible tourism and its impact on destination competitiveness
• Innovative solutions for making tourist attractions more inclusive
• Community engagement in promoting accessible tourism

Rural Tourism Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• The role of agritourism in rural economic development
• Challenges and opportunities in promoting rural tourism
• Cultural preservation in rural tourism destinations
• Community-based tourism initiatives in rural areas
• The impact of technology on rural tourism experiences
• Sustainable agriculture practices in rural tourism development
• The role of festivals and events in attracting tourists to rural areas
• Rural homestays and their contribution to local economies
• Ecological and cultural sustainability in rural tourism
• The role of local communities in shaping rural tourism policies

Film Tourism Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• The influence of movies and TV shows on travel decisions
• Film-induced tourism and its economic impact
• Movie location tours and their popularity among tourists
• The role of film festivals in promoting tourism destinations
• Collaborations between the film industry and tourism boards
• Celebrity endorsement and its impact on destination popularity
• Cultural representation in films and its influence on tourism
• Film-inspired marketing campaigns for tourist destinations
• Challenges and benefits of managing film tourism impacts
• The role of social media in promoting destinations featured in films

Tourism and Event Management Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Event tourism: Economic impacts and challenges
• Festival management and its role in Destination Branding
• The impact of mega-events on local communities
• Sustainable practices in event management for tourism
• Event sponsorship and its influence on destination promotion
• Cultural and historical events as tourist attractions
• Crisis management in the context of event tourism
• Technology integration in event planning for tourism
• Event tourism and its role in community development
• Evaluating the success of events in achieving tourism objectives

Volunteer Tourism Research Topics Ideas For College Students

• Motivations and expectations of volunteer tourists
• Ethical considerations in volunteer tourism programs
• The impact of volunteer tourism on local communities
• Volunteer tourism and its contribution to sustainable development
• Skill development through volunteer tourism experiences
• Challenges in managing volunteer tourism projects
• Cultural sensitivity in volunteer tourism initiatives
• Volunteer tourism and its potential for cross-cultural understanding
• Volunteer tourism as a tool for promoting responsible travel
• Evaluating the long-term impact of volunteer tourism on participants and host communities

100+ Most Interesting And Recent Tourism Research Topics Pdf

Here are the tourism research topics ideas for college students pdf:

Good Research Title For Tourism Students

Here are some suggested tourism research title ideas that college students could explore, presented in a table format:

Good Research Title About Tourism And Hospitality	Area of Focus
Implementing Water Conservation Systems in Hotels	Sustainable Tourism
Impact of Home-Sharing on Hotel Revenues	Hospitality Management
Virtual Reality and its Potential Applications for Travel Planning	Tourism Marketing
Cultural Preservation Through Community-Based Tourism Initiatives	Cultural Tourism
Factors Influencing Medical Tourism Growth in Southeast Asia	Medical Tourism
Gender Representation in Adventure Tourism Marketing	Adventure Tourism
Overtourism: Causes, Impacts, and Potential Solutions	Sustainable Tourism
How Covid-19 Transformed Traveler Expectations and Demands	Hospitality Management
How COVID-19 Transformed Traveler Expectations and Demands	Dark Tourism
Accessibility Practices Among Bed and Breakfast Establishments	Sustainable Tourism

Tourism research topics ideas for college students open doors to a world of possibilities. These topics offer diverse info, ranging from sustainable tourism practices to the influence of social media on travel decisions. As college students, these ideas provide a roadmap for investigation and discovery.

Diving into sustainable tourism, students can unravel the impacts of eco-certifications or delve into the economic benefits of green initiatives. Cultural tourism beckons with topics like heritage preservation and the role of museums in attracting visitors. For those interested in the intersection of healthcare and travel, medical tourism topics explore factors influencing its growth and ethical considerations.

The good tourism topics the daring, touching on risk management and the psychological aspects of extreme sports. Delving into the unique realm of dark tourism, students can examine visitor motivations and ethical concerns. Hospitality management topics invite exploration of trends, online reviews, and hotel leadership roles.

From tourism marketing to economic impacts and policy planning, these ideas are the best ideas for students to explore, offering academic enrichment and real-world implications for the industry. As students work on their research endeavors, these simple yet profound topics hold the potential to shape their understanding of the dynamic and evolving field of tourism.

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130+ Hospitality Research Topics: Great Ideas

A research paper is mandatory for all students to graduate from a course, including hospitality courses. Research in the hospitality industry can be easy if you have the right topic. So, one of the first things you should prioritize before starting your hospitality research is finding an excellent topic.

Great Hospitality Industry Research Topics

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A good topic for research in hospitality will serve as the foundation for your paper. It will also attract readers and trigger interest in your paper. Are you looking for a research title in the hospitality industry that guarantees a top grade? Check out the following examples in this article:

Research topics on the hospitality industry should focus on the key and hot topics faced in the sector. Here is a list of research titles for hotel and restaurant management:

• The origin and meaning of the word hospitality
• How different cultures view hospitality
• An in-depth look into the impacts of the COVID pandemic on the hospitality sector
• Hospitality and tourism: what is the link?
• Hospitality and hotel management: a comprehensive analysis
• The role of hospitality in the tourism sector
• Essential elements of the hospitality sector
• A strategic analysis of the hospitality sector in your country
• Etiquette in the hospitality sector
• Hospitality industry wages: what is fair?

An argumentative essay topic should state your opinion on a subject so you can argue it in the essay. Some argumentative essay topics on the hospitality industry are:

• Travel bans triggered by the COVID pandemic negatively impacted the hospitality sector
• The impacts of global trends on the hospitality sector
• Hospitality ethics: an in-depth analysis
• The relationship between a host and guest about hospitality
• The contributions of the hospitality sector to global economic growth
• Sustainability as a global trend in the hospitality sector
• The development of sustainability in the hospitality sector
• Challenges encountered by the hospitality sector in the 21 st century
• Technology as a tool for change in the hospitality sector
• Hospitality in Christian and Islam culture

Creativity is a vital element when choosing a research topic. It will make your essay stand out and attract readers. Here are some great examples of research topics about hospitality management and their reasons:

• Qualities of an effective hotel manager
• How customer service can influence the quality of hotel management
• Full-service vs. limited-service hotels: the difference in their hotel management
• How large hotels conduct revenue management
• Hotel management in European nations
• How can hotel management impact an establishment’s success?
• Financial accounting is a critical part of hotel management
• Hotel management: a comprehensive overview
• The impact of the internet on hotel management
• The role of hotel management on guest satisfaction rates

You should always find social media research topics for your hospitality research paper. Check out the following hospitality research topics:

• The impact of social media on the hospitality sector
• How companies in the hospitality sector take advantage of the power of the internet
• The social media influencer trend and its impact on the hospitality sector
• How hospitality practitioners use the internet to enhance their services
• Hospitality training and the internet
• Technology as a tool for hospitality training
• The role of the internet in hospitality diversification
• Social media and its impact on hospitality diversification
• Strategic ways for hospitality companies to take advantage of technology and the internet
• Social media and hospitality: the correlation

An excellent research title can play a vital role in earning good grades. Find a sample of a thesis statement about social media and more titles about hospitality management below:

• What is the role of a hotel manager
• Types of hotel managers in large establishments
• Core issues in the hospitality management sector
• Salary expectations for hotel managers
• The core roles of facility managers in the hospitality sector
• Hospitality as a virtue independent of the hospitality sector
• Factors that prevent hospitality managers from providing effective services
• Hotel marketing management: a comprehensive assessment
• Hotel revenue management: a comprehensive assessment
• Hotel management in your country

Tourism and hospitality often go hand in hand. So, you can cover the two elements in your research paper if you have an ideal topic that brings these concepts together. Check out the following research topics for STEM students :

• The tourism and hospitality sector after the coronavirus pandemic
• The long-term effects of travel bans on the tourism and hospitality sector
• What is the way forward for the tourism and hospitality sector after the pandemic?
• Online tourism: an in-depth analysis
• Advances in the tourism and hospitality sector
• Social advancing and tourism management: a comprehensive overview
• Medical tourism: an analysis
• Impacts of social media on the tourism and hospitality sector
• Impacts of government regulations on the tourism and hospitality sector
• The impacts of natural hazards on the tourism and hospitality sector

Sustainability research topics are critical for all tourism and hospitality students. Find research topics and ideas for tourism students related to sustainability below:

• Sustainability in the tourism sector
• Tourism sustainability: perspectives of guests and practitioners
• Sustainable tourism as a tool for heritage and culture preservation
• A study of sustainable tourism in mountainous destinations
• The practice of sustainable tourism in island destinations
• Challenges encountered in sustainable tourism
• The impacts of sustainable tourism on the digital world
• Sustainable tourism efforts for disaster prevention
• The impacts of the pandemic on sustainable tourism
• How is sustainable tourism measured?

A creative research title will show your reader what to expect from the rest of your paper. It creates a good first impression. Find a good thesis title or professional thesis writer about the hospitality industry below:

• Tourism marketing and sustainable tourism: an in-depth study
• Hospitality and tourism in emerging economies
• The correlation between ecotourism and sustainable tourism
• The impacts of politics in the hospitality sector
• An evaluation of local tourism and hospitality sectors
• The profitability of the hospitality sector
• How governments can improve their hospitality sectors
• The effect of local communities on the hospitality and tourism sector
• Sustainability is a critical trend in the hospitality sector
• A comparative analysis of the hospitality sector in the US and Europe

Hotel and restaurant management are significant topics in the Philippines. So, writing a good essay on these topics can come in handy for your academic performance. Find a good research title about hotel and restaurant management below:

• Hotel and restaurant management ethics in the Philippines
• Hotel and restaurant management laws in the Philippines
• Why should hotels invest in restaurants?
• The concept of perverse hospitality in the Philippines
• Hotel and restaurant management salaries in the Philippines
• The role of the Philippino government in hotel and restaurant management policies
• Strict hotel and restaurant management policies in the Philippines
• Smoking bans in hotels in the Philippines
• Fair wages in the hotel and restaurant management sector in the Philippines
• The concept of hospitality in Philippino hotel and restaurant management

Students studying social sciences can write research papers on hospitality management because these subjects are related. Find a research topic about hospitality management that covers social issues below. All social issues research topics are actionable.

• Hospitality training for hotel workers
• Flight attendants and hospitality: an overview
• How to conduct hospitality training for flight attendants
• How hotel managers can maximize profits in the hospitality sectors
• Challenges experienced in hospitality management
• Barriers to success in hospitality management
• The value of the hospitality sector for the global economy
• Hospitality management and augmented reality: an in-depth overview
• Safety precautions in hospitality management since the CORONA pandemic
• How local governments depend on the hospitality sector

The hospitality management sector and the economy industry often influence each other. So, you can write a paper that explains their link. Here are some economic research paper topics in hospitality management:

• How hospitality economics impact overall country economics
• How the hospitality sector can improve their profits
• Challenges hindering the hospitality sector from growth
• Hospitality laws and profitability: the correlation
• The best ways the hospitality market can improve their finance management
• Finance management in hospitality: an overview
• Personalization as a tool for promoting growth in the hospitality sector
• Countries that benefit the most from the hospitality sector
• Inbound tourism: its impact on the global economy
• Tourism and hospitality as tools for economic growth

Hospitality management is a popular course; all students must complete a research paper to graduate. So, you ought to be creative with your paper, especially the title, so it does not look like anyone else’s. Let us look at some excellent hospitality management thesis topics:

• The best tourist attractions
• Tourism management perceptions according to various cultures
• Diverse views of hospitality management
• Can hospitality management be taught?
• An in-depth look at ways hospitality management can be trained
• Hospitality management training for restaurant workers
• Key elements in hotel management
• How hotel management can influence its customer satisfaction rates
• How many managers should a hotel have
• Management and hospitality: a comprehensive guide

The hospitality management sector is prone to many changes. So you can easily find a current topic for your research paper. As you check out the hospitality thesis topics highlighted below, take some time to read about anatomy research paper topics .

• How competitive is the hospitality management sector?
• Causes of the high turnover in the hospitality sector
• Strategies that guide management organizations in the hospitality
• Hospitality management in Australia
• How the hospitality sector does employee management
• Basic training elements for hospitality management
• What type of training do hospitality management practitioners go through?
• The value of hospitality management
• Changes in hospitality management brought about by the internet
• How online reviews influence the hospitality management sector

Choosing the right topic is the first step to writing a good research or thesis paper in hospitality management. However, many students struggle to prepare quality research papers. If you are one of such students, worry not because we have got you covered.

You can trust us with your research paper writing needs. Our writers will help you create a paper that matches your quality topic to earn you excellent grades. Contact our writers today and get your quality research paper in no time. Feel free to read more on biochemistry topics .

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230+ Innovative Hospitality Management Research Topics In 2023

Have you ever thought about what goes on behind the scenes to make your hotel stay or restaurant food so great? Hospitality management research is like the investigative work of detectives in the world of hospitality. It aims to find ways to enhance your experiences away from home and ensure that hotels and restaurants run smoothly.

In this blog, we delve into the importance of research in the hospitality industry. It’s the key to enhancing guest experiences, optimizing business operations, and promoting sustainable practices. It keeps businesses up-to-date with changing trends and helps attract and retain the best staff, all while exploring innovative solutions for the challenges faced by the industry.

We’ll also provide you with over 230 innovative research topics in hospitality management for 2023, catering to various fields of study, whether you’re a social sciences, economics, STEM, or law and ethics student. So, if you’re curious about the world of hospitality research, read on to uncover the secrets of guest satisfaction and the ever-evolving landscape of this dynamic industry.

What Is Hospitality Management Research?

Table of Contents

Hospitality management research is like detectives studying how hotels, restaurants, and other places where people stay and eat can do things better. Imagine someone trying to find ways to make your hotel stay more comfortable or your restaurant meal tastier. That’s what researchers in hospitality management do. They ask questions, gather information, and use special tools to solve problems and make the experience of staying and eating out more enjoyable for everyone. They also look at how to make these places run smoothly and help the people who work there do their jobs better.

This kind of research is important because it helps hotels and restaurants become better at what they do. It can lead to new ideas and improvements that make guests happy and also help the businesses make more money. So, hospitality management research is all about finding ways to make your time away from home more enjoyable, relaxing, and delicious.

Importance Of Research In Hospitality Management

Here are some importance of research in hospitality management:

1. Enhancing Guest Experiences

Research in hospitality management helps hotels and restaurants figure out what makes guests happy. It’s like finding the secret recipe for a big smile. By asking questions and studying what guests like and don’t like, they can make stays and meals more enjoyable and memorable.

2. Efficient and Well-Run Businesses

Just like a chef needs a recipe to cook a delicious meal, businesses in hospitality need the right recipe for success. Research helps them find the best ways to do things, like how to manage staff, plan menus, and set prices. This makes the hotel or restaurant run smoothly and make more money.

3. Sustainable and Eco-Friendly Practices

Researchers in hospitality also look at ways to be kind to the planet. They explore how to save energy, reduce waste, and use fewer resources. This not only helps the environment but also saves money for businesses in the long run.

4. Keeping Up with Changing Trends

Travel and dining habits change over time, just like fashion trends. Hospitality research keeps businesses up-to-date with what’s popular and what’s not. It’s like knowing which clothing style is in fashion, but for hotels and restaurants.

5. Attracting and Training the Best Staff

Good staff is like the icing on a cake – they make everything better. Research in hospitality management helps businesses find and keep talented employees. Businesses can make their employees happier and more effective by knowing what they need and want. This will lead to better service for guests.

In this section, we will discuss hospitality management research topics: 

Great Hospitality Industry Research Topics

• Consumer Preferences in Sustainable Accommodations
• Technology’s Role in Personalizing Guest Experiences
• Crisis Management in the Post-COVID-19 Hospitality Sector
• Food Safety and Public Health in Restaurants
• Diversity and Inclusion in the Hospitality Workforce
• Cultural Exchange and Tourism Impact
• Managing Employee Turnover in Hospitality
• The Effect of Online Reviews on Hotel Selection
• Social Media Marketing for Hotels
• Environmental Responsibility in Hospitality Operations

Amazing Research Titles About Hospitality Industry

• Sustainable Hospitality: Green Practices and Guest Satisfaction
• Innovations in Guest Experience Management
• Resilience in the Face of Crisis: Hospitality Industry Strategies
• Digital Disruption in Hospitality: The Tech Transformation
• From Stars to Stories: Rethinking Hotel Ratings
• Exploring Cultural Tourism in the Hospitality World
• Unveiling the Secrets of Top-Rated Hotels: A Guest-Centric Analysis
• Banquets and Conferences in the Digital Age: Innovations in Event Management
• Social Media Crisis Communication for the Hospitality Industry
• Dining Experiences Beyond the Plate: Restaurant Innovations

List of Recommended Philippines Hotel and Restaurant Management Dissertation Topics

• Boutique Hotels and Local Tourism Development
• Culinary Tourism in the Philippines: A Flavorful Journey
• Community-Based Tourism Initiatives: Socioeconomic Impacts
• Sourcing Locally: Sustainable Food Practices in Filipino Restaurants
• Promoting Filipino Hospitality and Cuisine through Social Media
• Revenue Management Strategies for Philippine Hotels
• Cultural Festivals and Hotel Occupancy Rates
• Elevating Customer Service in Filipino Restaurants
• Ecotourism Trends and Eco-Friendly Accommodations in the Philippines
• Adapting to the ‘New Normal’: Challenges and Opportunities in Philippine Hospitality

Research Topics in Hospitality Management for Social Students

• Social Responsibility in Hospitality: A Comparative Study
• Indigenous Communities and Tourism: Social Implications
• Gender Diversity in Hospitality Leadership Roles
• Mental Health Among Hospitality Workers: A Social Perspective
• Social Media’s Impact on Destination Marketing
• Inclusivity and Diverse Populations in Hospitality
• Reducing Food Waste in Restaurants: A Social Goal
• Tourism as a Catalyst for Cultural Exchange
• Social Entrepreneurship in the Hospitality Sector
• Community Engagement in Tourism Development

Research Topics for Hospitality Management for Economy Students

• Mega Events and Their Economic Impact on Hospitality and Tourism
• Price Elasticity in the Hotel Industry
• Economic Analysis of All-Inclusive Resorts
• Tourism’s Role in the Economic Development of Developing Nations
• Foreign Investment in Hospitality: Economic Insights
• The Economics of Luxury Hotel Operations
• Market Entry Strategies for International Hotel Chains
• Tourism Taxes and Their Influence on Visitor Numbers
• Airbnb and Its Economic Impact on Traditional Hotels
• Agrotourism’s Economic Viability and Potential

Outstanding Research Titles For Hospitality Management Students

•  Crafting Exceptional Guest Experiences: A Study in Hospitality Excellence
•  Hospitality Resilience in Times of Crisis: Strategies and Success Stories
•  The Digital Revolution: Innovations in Hospitality Management
•  Beyond Stars and Diamonds: A New Era of Hotel Classification
•  The Art of Hospitality: Unveiling the Secrets of Top-Rated Establishments
•  Events Redefined: Innovations in Banquets and Conferences
•  Navigating Social Media in the Hospitality Industry
•  Sustainability and Responsibility: The Future of Hospitality
•  Restaurants Reinvented: Culinary Adventures in Modern Dining
•  Emerging Ethical Dilemmas in Hospitality Management

Leading Thesis Titles For Hospitality Management

•  Hotel Revenue Management Strategies and Their Impact on Profitability 
•  The Influence of Guest Reviews on Hotel Selection 
•  Digital Transformation in Hospitality: A Case Study of Leading Chains 
•  The Role of Environmental Practices in Guest Satisfaction 
•  Global Diversity in Hospitality Leadership: Challenges and Opportunities 
•  Promoting Cultural Tourism for Sustainable Economic Growth 
•  Employee Turnover: Causes, Costs, and Solutions in the Hospitality Sector 
•  Social Media Marketing for Hotels: Best Practices and Pitfalls 
•  Legal and Ethical Aspects of Food Safety in Restaurants 
•  The Sustainability Movement in Boutique Hotels: Case Studies 

Hotel Management Research Paper Ideas

•  Optimizing Hotel Room Pricing Strategies 
•  Enhancing Hotel Operations Through Technology 
•  Sustainable Practices in Hotel Management 
•  Crisis Management and Disaster Preparedness for Hotels 
•  The Role of Leadership in Hotel Success 
•  Innovations in Hotel Guest Services 
•  Customer Relationship Management in the Hotel Industry 
•  Effective Marketing Strategies for Hotels 
•  The Impact of Employee Training on Guest Satisfaction 
•  The Influence of Hotel Design on the Guest Experience 

Argumentative Essay Topics for Research in the Hospitality Industry

•  The Pros and Cons of All-Inclusive Resorts 
•  Online Travel Agencies vs. Direct Hotel Booking: Which is Better? 
•  The Ethics of Wildlife Tourism: Balancing Conservation and Entertainment 
•  The Role of Technology in Replacing Human Workers in Hospitality 
•  Is Sustainable Tourism Truly Achievable, or Just a Buzzword? 
•  Cultural Appropriation in the Restaurant Industry: Where to Draw the Line 
•  Balancing Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability in Tourism 
•  The Impact of Overtourism on Local Communities 
•  Are Hotel Loyalty Programs a Benefit or a Burden for Guests? 
•  Legal and Ethical Issues in Food Allergen Handling in Restaurants 

Read More 

• Social Media Research Topics
• Mental Media Research Topics

Creative Hospitality Management Research Topics

•  The Influence of Art and Design on Hotel Guest Experience 
•  Gastronomic Tourism: Exploring the World Through Food 
•  The Theater of Fine Dining: Immersive Restaurant Experiences 
•  Hospitality as a Form of Entertainment: Theatricality in Hotels and Restaurants 
•  Novel Approaches to Hotel Branding and Theme Concepts 
•  Music and Soundscapes in Enhancing Ambiance in Hospitality Establishments 
•  The Role of Storytelling in Hotel and Restaurant Marketing 
•  Innovative Hotel Room Features and Amenities 
•  Sensory Marketing in the Hospitality Industry 
•  Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Applications in Tourism and Hospitality 

Social Media Research Topics About the Hospitality Industry

• The Impact of Influencer Marketing on Hospitality Businesses
• Crisis Management in the Age of Social Media
• User-Generated Content and Its Influence on Hotel Bookings
• The Role of Instagram in Promoting Food Tourism
• The Viral Power of TikTok for Restaurant Marketing
• Online Reputation Management for Hotels and Restaurants
• Social Media as a Tool for Personalized Guest Experiences
• The Dark Side of Social Media: Handling Negative Reviews
• Popular Topics in Philippine Hotel and Restaurant Management Theses
• The Privacy Debate: Social Media and Guest Data in Hospitality

Excellent Research Titles About Hospitality Management

• The Guest Journey: A Holistic Approach to Hospitality Management
• Resilience in the Hospitality Industry: Lessons from Adversity
• Tech Transformation: Shaping the Future of Hospitality
• Guest Satisfaction Beyond Stars: Secrets of Highly Rated Hotels
• Innovations in Event Management: Redefining Conferences and Banquets
• Navigating the Digital Age: Social Media Marketing for Hotels
• Sustainability and Responsibility: The New Imperatives in Hospitality
• Culinary Experiences: The Evolution of Dining in the Modern Era
• Ethical Dilemmas in Hospitality Management: A Comprehensive Study
• Unlocking the Potential of Boutique Hotels: Case Studies

Tourism and Hospitality Research Topics for STEM

• Data Analytics in Tourism: Optimizing Operations and Guest Experiences
• Smart Cities and Sustainable Tourism Development
• Biotechnology and Food Safety in Hospitality
• The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Personalized Tourism Recommendations
• Environmental Engineering in Sustainable Hotel Design
• Renewable Energy Solutions for Eco-Friendly Accommodations
• Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in Destination Planning
• Sustainable Transportation and Tourism
• The Impact of 5G Technology on Tourism Services
• Waste Management and Recycling in the Hospitality Industry

Sustainability Research Topics for Tourism and Hospitality

• Zero-Waste Initiatives in Hotels: Challenges and Success Stories
• Sustainable Agriculture and Farm-to-Table Dining in Restaurants
• Carbon Footprint Reduction in Air Travel and Its Implications
• The Role of Green Certifications in Eco-Tourism
• Plastic Reduction Strategies in the Hospitality Sector
• Community-Based Tourism and Local Ecosystem Preservation
• Sustainable Water Management in Hotels and Resorts
• Sustainable Practices in Adventure Tourism
• Responsible Tourism and Conservation of Endangered Species
• Green Building Design and Energy Efficiency in Hotels

Simple Hospitality Research Topics

• The Importance of Customer Service in Hospitality
• Hotel Pricing Strategies and Occupancy Rates
• Food Safety and Hygiene in Restaurants
• The Impact of Guest Reviews on Hotel Reputation
• Staff Training and Retention in the Hospitality Industry
• Innovations in Hotel Room Design
• Effective Marketing Strategies for Small Hotels
• Local Food Sourcing for Sustainable Dining
• The Role of Hospitality in Economic Development
• The Psychology of Guest Satisfaction

Top Hospitality Research Ideas

•  Destination Branding and Its Legal Implications 
•  The Role of Insurance in Hospitality Risk Management 
•  Privacy and Data Protection in Guest Information Handling 
•  Intellectual Property and Copyright Laws in the Culinary World 
•  Alcohol Licensing and Regulation in the Hospitality Sector 
•  The Legal Aspects of Hotel Contracts and Booking Agreements 
•  Discrimination and Equal Opportunity Laws in Hospitality Employment 
•  Environmental Compliance in Hotel Building and Operations 
•  Liability in Tourism Activities: Legal Protection for Tour Operators 
•  Health and Safety Regulations in the Restaurant Industry 

Hospitality Management Research Topics

•  The Significance of Employee Training in Hospitality Service Excellence 
•  Innovations in Hotel Room Amenities and Design 
•  Food Safety and Hygiene Practices in High-End Restaurants 
•  The Role of Technology in Guest Service Enhancement 
•  Sustainability Initiatives in Hotel Operations 
•  Crisis Management Strategies in the Hotel Industry 
•  Tourism and Cultural Exchange: Promoting Diversity and Inclusion 
•  Legal and Ethical Issues in Alcohol Service at Restaurants 
•  The Psychology of Customer Loyalty in Hospitality 
•  The Impact of Hotel Design on Guest Satisfaction 

Research Topics on Hospitality and Tourism

•  The Interplay of Tourism and Local Culture Preservation 
•  Sustainable Tourism in Protected Natural Areas 
•  Hospitality Innovation for Accessible Tourism 
•  The Influence of Cultural Events on Hotel Bookings 
•  Online Travel Agencies and Their Impact on Small Hotels 
•  Destination Marketing through Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality 
•  Hotel Booking Behavior: A Comparative Study of Different Generations 
•  Disaster Preparedness and Crisis Management in Tourism 
•  The Effects of Weather and Climate on Tourism Destinations 
•  Dark Tourism: A Study of Morbid Attractions in Travel 

Excellent Hospitality Research Topics

•  The Power of Personalization in the Hospitality Industry 
•  Exploring Resilience in Crisis-Hit Tourism Destinations 
•  Hospitality Technology Adoption and Its Influence on Guest Satisfaction 
•  Beyond Stars and Diamonds: A New Era of Hotel Classification 
•  Crafting Unique Guest Experiences: A Study of High-Rated Hotels 
•  Innovations in Event Management: Rethinking Conferences and Banquets 
•  Social Media Marketing Strategies in the Hospitality Sector 
•  Sustainability and Responsibility: Imperatives for Future Hospitality 
•  The Evolution of Culinary Experiences in the Modern Dining Landscape 
•  Ethical Challenges in Hospitality Management: A Comprehensive Analysis 

Outstanding Hospitality Research Topics

•  The Guest Journey: A Holistic Approach to Hospitality Management 
•  Strategies for Resilience in the Hospitality Industry 
•  Digital Transformation in Hospitality: Innovations and Challenges 
•  Guest Satisfaction Beyond Stars: Unveiling Top Hotels’ Secrets 
•  Innovative Approaches to Event Management: Redefining Conferences and Banquets 
•  Social Media Marketing in Hospitality: Best Practices and Pitfalls 
•  Sustainability and Responsibility in the Modern Hospitality Landscape 
•  Reimagining Restaurants: Creative Concepts and Trends 
•  Ethical Dilemmas and Moral Compass in Hospitality Management 
•  Boutique Hotels: A New Wave of Luxury Accommodations 

Innovative Hospitality Dissertation Topics

•  The Impact of Blockchain Technology in Hotel Operations 
•  Augmented Reality and Its Application in Hotel Marketing 
•  Biosecurity Measures in Hospitality Post-Pandemic 
•  Sensory Marketing and Its Role in Guest Satisfaction 
•  Sustainable Practices in Hotel Interior Design 
•  Robotics and Automation in the Hospitality Industry 
•  Micro-Moments in Guest Decision-Making: A Mobile-First Approach 
•  Virtual Reality-Based Tourism Experiences 
•  Waste Reduction Strategies in Hotel Operations 
•  The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Hotel Leadership 

Unique Hospitality Research Paper Topics

•  The Impact of Feng Shui in Hotel Design and Guest Satisfaction 
•  The Use of Scent Marketing in Enhancing the Guest Experience 
•  The Role of Astronomy Tourism in Dark Sky Destinations 
•  Hospitality for Space Travel: Preparing for a New Frontier 
•  The Influence of Animal-Assisted Therapy in Hotel Stays 
•  The Revival of Historic Hotels: Challenges and Success Stories 
•  Gaming and Virtual Reality Integration in Hotel Entertainment 
•  Culinary Tourism and Edible Landscapes in Restaurants 
•  The Art of Mixology: Craft Cocktails in Modern Bars 
•  Hospitality as a Platform: Cross-Industry Collaborations in Guest Services

Hospitality Management Research Topics in the Philippines

•  The Impact of Ecotourism on Philippine Local Economies 
•  Local Food Sourcing and Sustainability in Filipino Restaurants 
•  Community-Based Tourism Initiatives in the Philippines 
•  Promoting Filipino Hospitality and Cuisine through Social Media 
•  Adapting to the ‘New Normal’: Challenges and Opportunities in Philippine Hospitality 
•  Cultural Festivals and Their Role in Philippine Tourism 
•  Boutique Hotels and Their Contribution to Philippine Tourism 
•  Sustainable Practices in the Philippine Hotel Industry 
•  Tourism and Indigenous Communities: Social and Economic Impacts 
•  COVID-19 and Its Effects on Philippine Hospitality: Lessons Learned 
• Tourism in the Philippines: Addressing Overcrowding and Overtourism

Challenges Face By Students During Hospitality Management Research 

Here are some challenges that are faced by students during hospitality Management research:

• Complexity of the Industry: The multifaceted nature of the hospitality industry demands an in-depth understanding of various sectors, making it challenging to focus on a specific research area.
• Data Collection: Gathering reliable and relevant data can be a hurdle, as it often requires cooperation from industry partners or access to real-time customer data.
• Changing Trends: Hospitality is constantly evolving with emerging trends and technologies. Students must keep up with these changes to ensure their research remains current.
• Cultural Diversity: The global nature of the industry means that students may encounter challenges when conducting research in culturally diverse settings, from language barriers to understanding local customs.
• Ethical Considerations: Studying the hospitality industry may involve complex ethical dilemmas, such as privacy concerns or the impact of research on businesses and employees.
• Resource Constraints: Access to resources for research, such as funding, relevant literature, and technology, can be limited, especially for students with tight budgets.
• Time Management: Balancing coursework, internships, and research can be demanding. Students often struggle with time management to meet deadlines and make progress in their research endeavors.

Hospitality Management Research is like the secret ingredient that makes hotels and restaurants better. It’s all about creating enjoyable experiences for guests, ensuring businesses run smoothly, and even being kind to our planet. As we’ve explored a wide range of research topics, it’s clear that this field is ever-evolving and holds countless opportunities for students and professionals alike.

By understanding the importance of research in enhancing guest satisfaction, improving business operations, and promoting sustainability, we can appreciate the immense impact it has on the hospitality industry. So, whether you’re a student or a business owner, keep exploring, innovating, and embracing the world of hospitality management research to ensure a brighter and more delightful future for all.

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Tourism and Hospitality Dissertation Topics

Published by Grace Graffin at January 10th, 2023 , Revised On May 17, 2024

Introduction

As a tourism student, you will be required to study the basics of tourism, hospitality, and event management. Some important issues surrounding tourism include but are not limited to medicine, finance, culture, geography, and more.

We understand that choosing the right dissertation topic can be a bit overwhelming for you. Therefore,  our writers have provided a comprehensive list of topics for the tourism dissertation. These topics are recent, relevant, and exploratory enough for you to conduct a comprehensive research study.

We can even customise topics according to your needs. So, go through our list of dissertation topics, choose the one that interests you, and let us know if you would like any help from our writers.

Check our  dissertation example to get an idea of  how to structure your dissertation .

You can review step by step guide on how to write your dissertation  here.

Latest Tourism Research Topics 

Investigating how the tourism industry has taken green and sustainable measures- a case study of uk.

Research Aim: This study will investigate the various aspects of the UK tourism industry geared towards making green and sustainable measures for environmental benefits. It will also look into the consumer’s perspective towards green tourism and its positive and negative impacts on the tourism industry and the tourists. It also helps you better understand the concept of a green environment and its influence on the tourism industry.

Environmental Management Systems and their Implementation in the UK- A Systematic Review.

Research Aim: This study will explore the quality of environmental management systems, environmental performance, improvements, and implementation in the UK. We will focus on different companies with high environmental impacts and how they have improved the environment and the use of environmental management systems (EMS). This study will also look into how it has changed or influenced the hospitality industry.

Investigating the impact of Social Media Recommendations on Hotel Booking in the UK.

Research Aim: Social media is a part of every aspect of our daily life. This research will investigate the influence of social media on tourism and specifically on choosing a hotel; it will also help you evaluate if consumers perceive social media-based recommendations differently than more traditional sources of internet-based marketing. Qualitative research will be used in this, followed by thematic analysis to find the role of social media in recommendations and influencing consumers’ searches. This will help us better understand how VR makes decisions and hotel bookings.

Assessing the Impact of Virtual Reality on Tourism.

Research Aim: Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology in tourism. This study will find the impact of virtual reality on the tourism industry. It will also investigate consumer behaviour towards it. We will better understand how VR has affected the tourism industry and significantly influenced the results. TAM research model will be developed to describe the nature of the 3D virtual world. It will also cover some psychological aspects to understand the consumer perspective.

Role of Social Media Marketing in deciding a Travel Destination- A Systematic Review.

Research Aim: This study investigates the role of social media marketing in deciding a travel destination. This study aims to find and understand how social media can achieve marketing objectives. Taking a quantitative approach, we will find the role of social media marketing and its effect on making travel choices through interviews and surveys. It will further explore the tourist’s perception, expectations, and experiences.

Investigating the Negative Impact of Travel Bans

Research Aim: This study explores the negative effects of travel bans on social, economic, cultural, and public health aspects. The study aims to analyse the repercussions of travel restrictions to inform policymaking. It will further investigate ways to avoid adverse consequences while promoting global mobility and cooperation. 

An Exploration of the Hospitality Industry Wages

Research Aim: To investigate the wage structures in the hospitality industry. This study explores factors influencing disparities and evaluates their implications. Insights will be provided on wage fairness, workplace satisfaction, gender discrimination, and industry competitiveness. It will also cover policies and practices to improve employee well-being and organisational performance.

Effects of Covid-19 on Tourism and Hospitality Dissertation Topics 

Topic 1: tourism after coronavirus pandemic - way forward for tourism and hospitality industry in the uk or any other country of your choice.

Research Aim: Tourism is a reason for most of the human mobility in the modern world. According to the World Tourism Organisation (2020), international tourism has indicated continuous growth for the tenth consecutive year, reporting 1.5 billion international tourist arrivals in 2019 and an estimated 1.8 billion international tourist arrivals by 2030 )people are forecasted to be. This particular research will focus on the effects of the Covid-19 outbreak on the tourism and hospitality industry in the United Kingdom or any other country of your choice.

Topic 2: Investigating the Long Term Effects of Prolonged and New Travel Restrictions on the UK Tourism Industry

Research Aim: Britain will require anyone entering the country to self-quarantine for two weeks, and other European countries are pondering similar measures, but the prospects of prolonged and even new travel restrictions are destroying what hopes the continent’s airlines and tourist industry have been harbouring of at least a partial coronavirus rebound. Can the tourism sector of the UK overcome these challenges?

Topic 3: Coronavirus: Dubai Tourism Insists Emirate's Hotel Sector is Healthy, Rejects Bloomberg Report but Is It Really the Case?

Research Aim: Dubai’s Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (Dubai Tourism) has denied a Bloomberg report about the emirate’s hospitality businesses adversely affected by the coronavirus pandemic. This research will employ primary research methodology to gather data from the key stakeholders of the Emirates hotel industry to assess whether or not the ongoing COVID-19 crisis is causing panic and financial damage to the hotel industry.

Topic 4: Will Easing the Travel Restrictions Benefit the UK Tourism Sector in the Short Term?

Research Aim: Many European countries, including the UK, are easing lockdown measures, including tourist destinations preparing for the summer. Cafes and restaurants in London and other cities hardest hit by the virus in the UK have opened two weeks behind the rest of the country. However, with most travellers preferring to stay home in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, how effective are these measures going to be?

Topic 5: Coronavirus outbreak: Caribbean Tourism Struggles as Visitors Stay Home

Research Aim: In the Caribbean, the government plans to require all visitors to undergo rapid Covid-19 testing upon entry. They hope provisions such as virus tests for all industry workers and socially distanced resort dining will make people feel comfortable travelling. This research study will explore whether the measures taken by the Caribbean government will actually encourage the visitors to leave the comfort of their home and travel in the midst of the Covid-19 Crisis.

Ecotourism and Community Participation Dissertation Topics 

Topic 1: online tourism agents and websites.

Research Aim: This research aims to study online tourism websites and travelling agents

Topic 2: Advances in Tourism and Hospitality Post-pandemic

Research Aim: This research aims to assess the advances in Tourism and Hospitality post-pandemic

Topic 3: Impacts of Social Distancing on Tourism Managements

Research Aim: This research aims to study the impacts of social distancing on tourism managements

Topic 4: Advances in Hotel Management Post-pandemic

Research Aim: This research aims to assess advances in Hotel management post-pandemic

Topic 5: The Linguistic Roots of the Word “Hospitality” across Different Languages

Research Aim: This research investigates the linguistic roots of the word hospitality across different languages and the semantic shifts over time.

Topic 6: The Relationship Between the Host and the Guest

Research Aim: This research explores the relationship between the host and the guest and how both need to act under laws and regulations.

Economic Conditions and Local Tourism Dissertation Topics

Topic 1: factors impacting destination selection for medical tourism.

Research Aim: Medical tourism is a growing trend. An increasing number of people travel to another country, seeking medical treatment which is expensive or unavailable on their own. Various factors impact the destination selection process for medical treatment purposes. The destination can be local or international. With limited evidence on the factors that impact destination selection for medical tourism, there is a need for a comprehensive study exploring these factors in detail.

Topic 2: Impact of Low budget Airline Services on Boosting International Tourism in Europe: A Case Study of Ryanair.

Research Aim: With increasing costs of air travelling, the demand for low-budget airline services is on the rise. Ryanair is one of the leading low-budget airline services based in the UK. Its cheap air tickets attract many regular travellers. Given this, the main aim of this research will be to explore whether or not low-budget airlines are actually helping to increase international tourism in Europe or not. This research will be conducted based on quantitative data which will be collected from a sample of Ryanair international tourism travellers.

Topic 3: Eco-friendly Practices and Their Effect on Hotel Selection Decision: A Case Study of UK Hospitality Industry.

Research Aim: Various technologies can be implemented to achieve eco-friendliness, such as; internet of things, automation technology, bamboo industrialisation, and sustainable building construction. On the other hand, eco-friendly practices include; water and energy conservation, renewable energy use, waste recycling and management, alternative plastic products, and more. Many hotels in the UK install solar panels and automated systems, which generate renewable energy and ensure complete automation for lights and water. It is worth evaluating how eco-friendly technologies and practices affect the hotel selection decision of guests in the UK hospitality industry.

Topic 4: How Economic Conditions of a Country Impact its Local Tourism: Identifying the Economic Factors Influencing the Tourism Sector.

Research Aim: Economic factors have a great impact on tourism. When a country is economically strong, it spends a great deal on tourism development. On the other hand, tourism could be adversely affected if a country is struggling with its finances. This research aims to investigate and critically analyse the economic factors which tend to affect the tourism sector of a country. The study will also weigh the economic upsides and downsides of these factors concerning local tourism.

Topic 5: Assessing the Impact of Social Media Platforms on Tourism Destination Selection.

Research Aim: These days, social media websites play a tremendous role for tourists in destination selection. The experiences and reviews that people share on online social platforms have a huge impact on making or breaking the future of any tourist destination. This research will analyze the role of different social media platforms in choosing tourism destinations among tourists. This research will also shed light on the rationale and factors people rely on social media to select their tourism destination.

Topic 6: Assessing the Impact of Government Rules, Regulations, and Policies on Tourism Development: A Case Study of Developing Countries.

Research Aim: The tourism sector of any country is greatly looked after by governmental and regulatory bodies. This research will analyze the role played by such bodies from the perspective of policymaking and regulation implementation. The study will also explore how the impact of policymaking and government regulations in developed countries might be different from that of developing countries.

Topic 7: Analysing the Impact of Natural Hazaresearch will measure the customer satisfaction of British lesbians after they have undergone gender reassignment at the Yanhee International Hospital in Bangkok.

Research Aim: Natural hazards can have a disastrous effect on the tourism industry of any country. The UK is one of the countries where the tourism industry has experienced huge success. Thus, this research will be carried out to analyze the impact of such hazards on the UK’s tourism sector.

Topic 8: Assessing the Factors and Preferences Impacting Tourist's Decisions to Travel to a Dark Tourism Site.

Research Aim: As a result of a shift in preferences of tourists and an urge to explore and learn, dark tourism has gained immense popularity and success in recent times. This research will explore the factors and reasons why tourists choose dark places as their tourism destination.

Topic 9: The Impact of Travel Bloggers and vloggers on the Tourism Industry.

Research Aim: Travel bloggers and vloggers are an important part of the tourism industry now. These people travel the world, document their experiences through their writing or videos, and influence people. Tourists throughout the world now depend on their reviews and choose their travel destinations accordingly. This research will aim to explore how these influencers have completely changed the tourism industry.

Educational Tourism Dissertation Topics

Tourism has gained tremendous popularity among academicians and researchers in recent times. Educational tourism primarily takes into consideration technical competencies and new knowledge gained outside the classroom environment.

Educational tourism brings to light the idea of travelling to learn about the cultures of other nations. Exchange student programmes are perhaps the most commonly employed educational tourism strategy, allowing students to learn about the culture of the host nation through research work and travel. Possible areas of research in this field of tourism for your dissertation are provided below;

Topic 1: Educational Tourism Programmes and the Popularity of Host Nations

Research Aim: This research will discuss the educational exchange programmes in detail and will also assess how educational tourism can add to the appeal of the host nations for prospective tourists.

Topic 2: Factors Affecting the Decision of British Students to Join International Student Exchange Programmes.

Research Aim: Even though student exchange programmes are popular throughout the world, there are certain countries where they are practised the most. This research will study one such country, the UK, concerning the factors that encourage British students to join international exchange programmes.

Topic 3: Factors Contributing Towards the Success of Work & Study Programmes in the UK

Research Aim: This research will analyse the factors that contribute towards the success of study programmes in the UK, i.e. benefits of studying in the UK and the attractiveness of the UK as a place to live and study.

Topic 4: To Analyse the Satisfaction of International Students Enrolled in Student Exchange Programmes in the UK

Research Aim: This research will cover an important topic, i.e., measure the satisfaction of international students enrolled in exchange programs in the UK – the same topic can be used for any other country such as the USA or Canada.

Topic 5: To Investigate Potential Marketing and Communication Tools to Promote “any country” as the Best Place to Pursue Higher Education.

Research Aim: This research will investigate and conclude the most successful marketing and communication tools that are used to promote exchange programmes in a particular country. The topic can be customised according to the country of your choice.

Topic 6: What are the factors Influencing British Students’ Decision to Join Academic Year Exchange Programme in Japan?

Research Aim: Japan is one of the most popular destinations when it comes to student exchange programmes. This research will assess the factors that influence a British student’s decision to go to Japan to pursue education.

Topic 7: To Examine the Popularity of Student Exchange Programmes Offered by Chinese-speaking Countries.

Research Aim: This research will explore the reasons for the popularity of student exchange programmes in countries where Chinese is the official language such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, etc.

Topic 8: To Investigate the Attitude and Perception of British Students toward Summer Camps.

Research Aim: Summer camps are extremely popular in the west. This research will explore the perceptions of British students towards summer camps and what motivates them to attend them.

Topic 9: Factors Affecting the Decision of University Students to Pursue a Placement Programme in the US?

Research Aim: This research will aim to understand the rationale of university students’ decisions to pursue placement programmes in the US,

Topic 10: To Examine the Satisfaction of University Students Returning from Cultural Exchange Programmes in the US.

Research Aim: This research will aim to understand the satisfaction of university students who are on their way back from exchange programmes in the US.

Medical Tourism Dissertation Topics

Medical tourism is a new area of study in the tourism industry. The gap in the prices of medical facilities available in developing and developed countries is significant, propelling many patients to travel to far destinations to benefit from economic, medical services.

Similarly, many financially well-off patients decide to have medical treatment in foreign countries with advanced and established medical systems that provide state-of-the-art medical facilities unavailable in their home countries.

Although there may be insufficient secondary data to analyse this tourism sub-topic, researching this area will prove to be interesting. You can choose your medical tourism dissertation topics from this list.

Topic 1: Investigating the Reasons Why British Citizens Travel to Different Countries for their Dental Procedures

Research Aim: This research will identify and discuss in detail the reasons why British citizens travel to different countries for dental treatment.

Topic 2: The efficacy of marketing and communication tools employed by Thai plastic surgery and extreme makeover service providers – An investigation into the attitude and perception of British travellers.

Research Aim: A large number of British citizens travel to Thailand for cosmetic and plastic surgeries. This research will aim to understand the attitudes and perceptions of British travellers who opt for these surgeries in a foreign country. The research will also assess the marketing and communication tools employed by Thai medical service providers.

Topic 3: To Identify and Discuss Critical Marketing Strategies to Promote a Weight Loss Centre in the UK.

Research Aim: This research will talk about the marketing strategies that are undertaken in the UK to promote weight loss centres.

Topic 4: Measuring Customer satisfaction of British Lesbians After Having Sex Reassignment at Yanhee International Hospital, Bangkok

Research Aim: This research will measure the customer satisfaction of British lesbians after they have undergone gender reassignment at the Yanhee International Hospital in Bangkok.

Topic 5: To Examine the Factors Influencing the Decisions of British Women to Buy Body Contour Tour Packages in East Asia.

Research Aim: This study will analyze the factors that influence the decision-making of British women when burying body contour tour packages in East Asia.

Topic 6: To Investigate the Extent to Which Swiss Weight Control Tour Packages Have Influenced Women in the UK.

Research Aim: This research will focus on the decision-making detriments of British Women who opt to purchase weight control tour packages in Switzerland.

Topic 7: How Young British Females Perceive Facial Lifting package Tours in East Asia?

Research Aim: This study will analyze how young British females perceive facial lifting package tours in East Asia.

Topic 8: To Understand and Discuss the Factors Affecting Buying Decisions to Benefit from Extreme Makeover Tour Packages in Eastern Europe.

Research Aim: This research will critically explore the factors that influence the buying decision of customers who purchase extreme makeover packages from Eastern Europe.

Topic 9: How Attractive are the Plastic Surgery Makeover Services to Female British Customers – A Qualitative Study

Research Aim: This research will understand and analyze the attractiveness of plastic surgery makeover services that influence British females to purchase them. The research will be descriptive in nature.

Topic 10: How Homosexual Men Choose Medical Tour Packages for Sex Reassignment.

Research Aim: This study will investigate gender reassignment tour packages that interest homosexual men and the factors influencing their decision-making process.

Tourism Management Dissertation Topics

Tourism management is perhaps the most interesting area of the tourism industry. It mainly involves travelling for the purpose of leisure and recreation. People travelling to other countries and outside their usual environment with the intent of leisure can be classified as tourists.

It should be noted that the phenomenon of tourism has grown tremendously in recent years, thanks to the impact of globalisation. There are many countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Maldives, and Fiji, whose largest source of income is tourism. In these countries, tourism generates huge revenue for the government and also provides employment opportunities for the working class as well as businesses.

The suggestions below can help you to narrow your research for your tourism dissertation.

Topic 1: How British Tourists Perceive Chinese World Heritage Tour – A Qualitative Study

Research Aim: This research will focus on how British tourists perceive Chinese heritage and what compels them to visit China.

Topic 2: Exploring the Factors that Make London the Most Popular Destination for Christmas Shopping

Research Aim: This research will analyse and explore the various factors that promote London as one of the most attractive destinations for Christmas shopping.

Topic 3: Investigating the Underlying Factors that British Citizens Consider when Choosing a Destination for Their Winter Holidays.

Research Aim: This research will analyse the various factors that British citizens consider and evaluate when choosing a destination for their winter vacations.

Topic 4: An Analysis of Factors Affecting Employees’ Motivation in Luxury Hotels of Dubai.

Research Aim: This research will study the factors influencing employee motivation in luxury and five-star hotels in Dubai. The study will make use of secondary data and primary research to establish the exact factors that motivate employees to work for luxury hotels in Dubai.

Topic 5: How the Tourism Industry of Thailand Responded to the Tsunami.

Research Aim: This study will dive into the past to establish how the Thai tourism industry responded to Tsunami.

Visit our topics database to view 100s of dissertation topics in your research area.

Topic 6: Factors Influencing British Customers’ Decisions of Purchasing Egypt Tour Packages.

Research Aim: This research will explore the factors that British citizens consider when planning their holiday to Egypt.

Topic 7: Attitude and Perception of British Tourists Toward Thailand as a Winter Holiday Destination

Research Aim: This study will research why the British choose Thailand as their winter holiday destination.

Topic 8: The Increasing Popularity of Cruise Travel in South Africa Among British Tourists

Research Aim: This research will consider the reasons why South African cruise is extremely popular amongst British tourists.

Topic 9: To Investigate the Efficacy of Integrated Marketing Communication Tools to Restore the Image of Amsterdam as the Best Tourist Destination in Europe

Research Aim: This research will explore the marketing and communication tools utilized to market Amsterdam as the best tourism destination in Europe.

Topic 10: Factors Influencing British Customers’ Decision to Choose a Particular Destination During the Summer/winter Holiday

Research Aim: This research will discuss all the factors that influence British citizens to choose a destination for their summer or winter holidays. This topic can be customized according to a country of your choosing.

Hospitality Dissertation Topics

Hospitality industry  consists of casinos, resorts, restaurants, hotels, catering as well as other businesses that serve the tourists. At its core hospitality can be defined as the relationship between a guest and the hotel.

Other aspects of hospitality include but are not limited to liberality, friendliness, warm welcome, entertainment, goodwill, and reception. Modern-day businesses pride themselves on their acts of hospitality. Thus, it is an extremely interesting sub-topic to base your dissertation on. Some topics in this area of tourism are suggested below.

Topic 1: Examining How Popular Travel Agents Such as eBrooker and Opodo are Perceived by British Tourists

Research Aim: This research will evaluate some of the best and most popular travel agents such as Opodo and eBookers and how they assist British tourists with their destination planning.

Topic 2: Identifying the Factors that Influence Leisure Hotel Buying Decisions of British Customers

Research Aim: This research will identify the factors that influence British customers’ decision to opt for luxury hotels.

Topic 3: Identifying Features of a leisure hotel that attract British honeymoon couples

Research Aim: This research will identify features of a luxury hotel that attract British couples looking for a honeymoon location.

Topic 4: Investigating Hospitality Practices of Popular Leisure Hotels in Dubai

Research Aim: This study will investigate hospitality purchases of attractive luxury hotels in Dubai.

Topic 5: What are the Prime Factors Influencing Restaurant Selection Decisions of Young British Couples?

Research Aim: This research will explore the factors that influence British couples to select restaurants for their time out.

Topic 6: Investigating and Reviewing Strategies Employed by Hotel Restaurants and Pubs in London to Keep Their Employees Motivated

Research Aim: This research will study an important aspect of the tourism industry, i.e., how hotel restaurants and pubs in London keep their employees motivated.

Topic 7: Exploring the Relationship Between Culture and Leisure Hotel Buying Decisions in London.

Research Aim: This research will investigate the relationship between how customers in London choose a luxury hotel based on their culture.

Topic 8: Creating Brand Sales and Recognition Using Integrated Marketing Communication Tools.

Research Aim: This research will explore how brand sales and recognition are built using various marketing and communication tools.

Topic 9: Understanding the Relationship Between Customers’ Buying Decisions and Leisure Hotel Hospitality Features within the Context of Overseas Holidays

Research Aim: This research will explore the relationship between customers’ decision to choose a luxury hotel while visiting different countries.

Topic 10: The Impact of Hospitality Companies’ Brand Image on Tourists’ Buying Decisions.

Research Aim: This research will first talk about different hospitality companies and how their brand image impacts tourists’ buying decisions.

Black Tourism Dissertation Topics

Black tourism, also known as dark tourism and grief tourism, involves travelling to historical sites/places associated with death, casualties, and suffering.

Dark or black tourist sites such as battlefields, monuments, castles, Tsunami sites, and Ground Zero are man-made or natural. They are found commonly in Scotland, South Asia, China, and Eastern Europe.

Dark tourism may not be the ideal choice for many students. However, it is an exciting topic to explore. Possible research topics under this field of tourism are listed below:

Topic 1: How Local Communities Can Benefit Commercially and Socially from Tours to Death/Casualty Sites – A Qualitative Study

Research Aim: This research will explore the various benefits that local communities can experience from touring death or casualty sites.

Topic 2: Attitude and Perception of Tourists Towards Taj Mahal in India

Research Aim: Taj Mahal can be categorised as a dark tourism site because many people consider it a mausoleum. This research will discuss the attitude and perceptions of tourists when visiting the Taj Mahal.

Topic 3: To Investigate and Identify the Factors Influencing Tourists’ Decisions to Visit gGrief Sites in the UK

Research Aim: This research will explore the factors that influence the decisions of tourists to visit grief sites in the UK.

Topic 4: Is Mercat Tour in Scotland a Grief Tourism Site for Potential Tourists?

Research Aim: Mercat Tour in Scotland is considered a ghost site. This study will explore what makes this site a dark tourism destination.

Topic 5: Developing a Highly Effective Marketing Strategy to Promote London Dungeon Among the Tourists

Research Aim: This research will understand the various marketing strategies undertaken to promote the London Dungeon amongst tourists.

Topic 6: What are the Primary Factors Influencing British Tourists’ Decision to Choose Grief Sites?

Research Aim: This research will understand the various factors that influence British tourists’ decision to select a dark tourism site.

Topic 7: Developing a Marketing Strategy to Promote Beaumaris Prison in Wales as Another Black Tourism Site in Britain

Research Aim: This research will focus on developing a successful marketing strategy that will help promote Beaumaris Prison in Wales as a black tourism site in Britain.

Topic 8: How are Man-made Grief tourism Sites are Perceived by British Tourists?

Research Aim: This research will discover how British tourists perceive man-made dark tourism destinations.

Comparing the Man-made Black Tourism Sites with the Natural Disaster Grief Sites from the Perspective of Tourists

Research Aim: This research will compare manmade and natural dark tourism destinations with a focus on tourists’ perceptions.

Topic 10: Do the Local Communities Economically Benefit from Tourists Visiting Dark Tourism Sites?

Research Aim: This research will explore whether or not local communities are impacted in any way when dark tourist sites in their locality are visited.

Sustainability and Tourism Dissertation Topics

At its core, this field of tourism primarily focuses on the way tourists can live harmoniously with the planet earth. Ecotourist sites or sustainable tourist sites are those that promote fauna and flora and cultural heritage. Another objective of  eco-tourism  is to provide social and economic opportunities to local communities. Some interesting topics worth exploring, in this area, are suggested below:

Topic 1: Investigating the Impact of the Internet on the Growth of Eco-tourism in the UK

Research Aim: This research will study the impact of the internet on the rising eco-tourism trend in the UK.

Topic 2: Factors Affecting British Customers’ Decision of Choosing an Eco-tourism

Research Aim: This research will study the reason why British tourists opt for an eco-tourism site as compared to traditional destinations.

Topic 3: Establishing and Discussing Strategies to Promote Swansea as the Best Eco-tourist Spot in the UK

Research Aim: This research will discuss the various ways through which Swansea can be promoted as the best eco-tourist spot in the UK.

Topic 4: Analysing the Role of Price in the Selection of Eco-tourism Destinations

Research Aim: This research will understand the various factors that influence the tourists’ decision to choose an eco-friendly site for their next holiday destination.

Topic 5: Examining the Use of Integrated Marketing Communication Tools to Promote Eco-tourism in Great Britain

Research Aim: This research will study and analyze the different ways through which integrated marketing communication tools should be used to promote eco-tourism in the UK.

Topic 6: Comparing Developing World Eco-tourism Sites Against Western Eco-tourism Sites

Research Aim: This study will compare developing eco-tourism sites and developed or Western eco-tourism sites. The study will conclude which sites tourists prefer and what factors lead them to their decision.

Topic 7: Does Eco-tourism Develop Social and Economic Opportunities for Local Communities?

Research Aim: This research will explore whether or not eco-tourism helps develop social and economic opportunities in the local communities. If it does, the study will explore those factors as well.

Topic 8: Exploring the Factors Affecting the Buying Decisions of Customers Interested in Eco-tourism Sites

Research Aim: This research will identify and discuss the various factors that affect the buying decision of customers who are interested in eco-tourism sites. These factors will then be explored in detail in this study.

Topic 9: Analysis of the Potential of Edinburgh as an Eco-tourism Site in the UK

Research Aim: This research will compare manmade and natural dark tourism destinations and will also include tourists’ perceptions.

Topic 10: Assessing the Impact of Grass Root level Education in Promoting Sustainable Tourism in Europe – A Review of the Literature

Research Aim: This research will discuss the impact of grass root level education to promote sustainable tourism in Europe. The study will be based on the qualitative research method.

Important Notes:

As a tourism and hospitality student looking to get good grades, it is essential to develop new ideas and experiment with existing tourism and hospitality theories – i.e., to add value and interest to your research topic.

The field of tourism and hospitality is vast and interrelated with many other academic disciplines like civil engineering, construction, law, engineering management, healthcare, mental health, artificial intelligence, physiotherapy, sociology, management, marketing, and nursing . That is why it is imperative to create a project management dissertation topic that is particular and sound and actually solves a practical problem that may be rampant in the field.

We can’t stress how important it is to develop a logical research topic; it is the basis of your entire research. There are several significant downfalls to getting your topic wrong: your supervisor may not be interested in working on it, the topic has no academic creditability, the research may not make logical sense, and there is a possibility that the study is not viable.

This impacts your time and efforts in  writing your dissertation as you may end up in a cycle of rejection at the very initial stage of the dissertation. That is why we recommend reviewing existing research to develop a topic, taking advice from your supervisor, and even asking for help in this particular stage of your dissertation.

While developing a research topic, keeping our advice in mind will allow you to pick one of the best tourism and hospitality dissertation topics that fulfil your requirement of writing a research paper and add to the body of knowledge.

Therefore, it is recommended that when finalizing your dissertation topic, you read recently published literature to identify gaps in the research that you may help fill.

Remember- dissertation topics need to be unique, solve an identified problem, be logical, and be practically implemented. Please take a look at some of our sample tourism and hospitality dissertation topics to get an idea for your dissertation.

How to Structure Your Tourism and Hospitality Dissertation

A well-structured   dissertation can help students   to achieve a high overall academic grade.

• A Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Declaration
• Abstract: A summary of the research completed
• Table of Contents
• Introduction : This chapter includes the project rationale, research background, key research aims and objectives, and the research problems to be addressed. An outline of the structure of a dissertation  can also be added to this chapter.
• Literature Review: This chapter presents relevant theories and frameworks by analyzing published and unpublished literature available on the chosen research topic in light of the research questions to be addressed. The purpose is to highlight and discuss the relative weaknesses and strengths of the selected research area while identifying any research gaps. A breakdown of the topic and key terms can have a positive impact on your dissertation and your tutor.
• Methodology:  The  data collection  and  analysis methods and techniques employed by the researcher are presented in the Methodology chapter, which usually includes  research design, research philosophy, research limitations, code of conduct, ethical consideration, data collection methods, and  data analysis strategy .
• Findings and Analysis: The findings of the research are analysed in detail under the Findings and Analysis chapter. All key findings/results are outlined in this chapter without interpreting the data or drawing any conclusions. It can be useful to include  graphs ,  charts, and  tables in this chapter to identify meaningful trends and relationships.
• Discussion  and  Conclusion: The researcher presents his interpretation of results in this chapter and states whether the research hypothesis has been verified or not. An essential aspect of this section is to establish the link between the results and evidence from the literature. Recommendations with regard to the implications of the findings and directions for the future may also be provided. Finally, a summary of the overall research, along with final judgments, opinions, and comments, must be included in the form of suggestions for improvement.
• References:  Make sure to complete this in accordance with your University’s requirements
• Bibliography
• Appendices:  Any additional information, diagrams, graphs that were used to  complete the dissertation  but not part of the dissertation should be included in the Appendices chapter. Essentially, the purpose is to expand the information/data.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How to find dissertation topics about tourism and hospitality.

To find tourism and hospitality dissertation topics:

• Examine industry trends and challenges.
• Explore cultural, environmental, or tech impacts.
• Research niche areas like ecotourism or event management.
• Analyse customer behaviour and satisfaction.
• Consider sustainable practices.
• Select a topic aligning with your passion and career aspirations.

What is the best research topic for tourism?

There is no one best topic, but here is a trending topic. “The Impact of Virtual Reality Technology on Tourist Experience and Destination Promotion: A Comparative Analysis.” This research topic explores how VR technology affects tourist perceptions, engagement, and decision-making and its implications for destination marketing strategies, comparing traditional methods with VR-based approaches in tourism promotion.

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Business psychology improves job satisfaction and motivates employees to perform better. In simple terms, it is the study of how people and groups interact to maximize their productivity.  

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• How It Works

105+ Hospitality Research Topics [Updated 2024]

• Post author By admin
• May 8, 2024

In a bustling world where travel and leisure are increasingly essential aspects of our lives, the hospitality industry plays a pivotal role. From cozy bed-and-breakfasts to luxurious resorts, from trendy urban eateries to quaint countryside cafes, hospitality businesses cater to our need for comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment. But have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes? What makes some hospitality ventures thrive while others struggle? Join us on a journey through the fascinating world of hospitality research topics, where we unravel the mysteries and unveil the secrets of this vibrant industry.

Table of Contents

What Do You Mean By Hospitality?

Hospitality means being friendly and kind to guests or people you don’t know. It’s about making them feel welcome and comfortable, so they enjoy their time with you. Examples of hospitality include:

• Hotel Accommodation: Providing comfortable rooms, amenities, and personalized services to guests staying at a hotel.
• Restaurant Service: Welcoming diners, providing attentive service, and ensuring a pleasant dining experience, including food quality and ambiance.
• Tourist Attractions: Offering informative guided tours, assistance, and facilities to visitors exploring tourist destinations.
• Event Hosting: Organizing and hosting events such as weddings, conferences, or parties, ensuring guests’ needs are met and they feel welcome.
• Homestays: Welcoming guests into one’s home and providing accommodation, meals, and hospitality similar to that of a hotel.
• Travel Services: Assisting travelers with transportation, accommodations, and activities, ensuring a smooth and enjoyable journey.

105+ Hospitality Research Topics: Category Wise

Consumer behavior in hospitality.

• The impact of online reviews on hotel bookings.
• Trends in consumer preferences for dining experiences.
• The influence of social media on travel decision-making.
• Understanding the motivations of eco-conscious travelers.
• Consumer perceptions of luxury vs. budget accommodations.
• The role of loyalty programs in shaping guest behavior.
• The influence of online food delivery platforms on restaurant choices.
• Preferences for experiential accommodations (e.g., treehouses, glamping).
• Understanding cultural differences in dining behavior among international tourists.
• The impact of COVID-19 on travel decision-making and consumer behavior.
• Accessibility considerations in hospitality for guests with disabilities.
• Emerging trends in solo travel and their implications for hospitality businesses.

Sustainable Practices in Hospitality

• Implementing green initiatives in hotel operations.
• Assessing the effectiveness of waste reduction programs in restaurants.
• Renewable energy adoption in the hospitality industry.
• Sustainable sourcing practices in food and beverage operations.
• Eco-friendly design trends in hotel construction.
• The economic benefits of sustainability initiatives for hospitality businesses.
• Reducing single-use plastics in hotel amenities and packaging.
• Carbon footprint reduction strategies for hospitality transportation services.
• Water conservation initiatives in hotel operations and landscaping.
• Assessing the social impact of sustainable tourism projects on local communities.
• Green certification programs and their influence on consumer choices.
• Innovative approaches to upcycling and repurposing waste in hospitality operations.

Technology and Innovation in Hospitality

• The impact of AI on guest service and personalization.
• Integrating IoT devices for improved hotel management.
• Blockchain applications in hotel booking and payment systems.
• Virtual reality experiences in destination marketing.
• Mobile app trends in hospitality and their impact on guest satisfaction.
• Data analytics for enhancing hotel revenue management.
• Augmented reality applications for enhancing guest experiences in museums and attractions.
• Robotics and automation in restaurant kitchens and food delivery services.
• Voice recognition technology for personalized guest interactions in hotels.
• Smart building technologies for energy efficiency and guest comfort.
• Cybersecurity challenges and solutions for hospitality businesses.
• The role of big data analytics in predicting travel trends and demand forecasting.

Marketing and Branding in Hospitality

• Brand positioning strategies for boutique hotels.
• Influencer marketing in the hospitality industry.
• Social media trends for restaurant promotion.
• Content marketing strategies for destination marketing organizations.
• Cross-cultural branding challenges in international hospitality.
• The role of storytelling in hotel branding and guest engagement.
• Crisis communication strategies for managing reputation in the face of negative events.
• Personal branding for hospitality professionals (e.g., chefs, hoteliers).
• Community-based tourism marketing strategies for rural destinations.
• Experiential marketing campaigns in the luxury hospitality sector.
• User-generated content and its impact on destination branding.
• Co-branding partnerships between hotels and lifestyle brands.

Human Resource Management in Hospitality

• Recruitment strategies for attracting top talent in the hospitality industry.
• Training programs for enhancing hotel staff guest service skills.
• Employee engagement initiatives in restaurant workplaces.
• Diversity and inclusion practices in hotel workforce management.
• Addressing burnout and turnover in the hospitality sector.
• The impact of COVID-19 on hospitality workforce dynamics.
• Employee wellness programs and their impact on productivity and retention.
• Talent management strategies for addressing skills shortages in the hospitality industry.
• Flexible staffing models for seasonal fluctuations in tourism demand.
• The gig economy and its implications for hospitality employment.
• Conflict resolution techniques for handling guest complaints and disputes.
• Employee empowerment and its role in improving guest satisfaction scores.

Tourism and Destination Management

• Destination competitiveness analysis in the global tourism market.
• Sustainable tourism development strategies for emerging destinations.
• The role of cultural heritage preservation in destination management.
• Destination marketing for niche tourism segments (e.g., adventure travel, culinary tourism ).
• Tourism carrying capacity assessment in popular destinations.
• Crisis management strategies for destinations affected by natural disasters or political unrest.
• Dark tourism and its ethical considerations in destination marketing.
• Sustainable transportation options for reducing carbon emissions in tourism destinations.
• The impact of overtourism on local infrastructure and resident quality of life.
• Health and wellness tourism trends and destination development opportunities.
• The role of festivals and events in destination branding and economic development.
• Rural tourism development strategies for revitalizing declining communities.

Hospitality Operations and Management

• Lean management principles in hotel operations.
• Food safety protocols in restaurant kitchens.
• The impact of automation on hospitality service delivery.
• Customer relationship management strategies for enhancing guest loyalty.
• Outsourcing trends in hotel operations (e.g., housekeeping, F&B).
• Implementing flexible work schedules for hospitality employees.
• Supply chain management best practices for reducing food waste in hospitality.
• The use of biometrics for enhancing security and streamlining guest check-in processes.
• Space optimization strategies for maximizing revenue in hotel meeting and event spaces.
• Implementing contactless payment systems and digital wallets in hospitality.
• Sustainable menu design and sourcing practices in restaurants.
• Employee cross-training programs are used to enhance operational flexibility and efficiency.

Cultural and Ethical Issues in Hospitality

• Cross-cultural communication challenges in hotel guest interactions.
• Ethical considerations in hotel revenue management practices.
• Sustainable tourism and indigenous community engagement.
• Addressing cultural appropriation in restaurant menus and branding.
• LGBTQ+ inclusivity in hospitality marketing and service delivery.
• Human rights issues in the hospitality supply chain.
• Ethical considerations in wildlife tourism and animal interactions.
• Indigenous foodways preservation and promotion in hospitality establishments.
• Gender equality and diversity initiatives in hospitality leadership positions.
• Fair trade and ethical sourcing practices in hotel and restaurant procurement.
• Cultural heritage preservation through culinary tourism experiences.
• Ethical dilemmas in hotel revenue management and pricing strategies.

Future Directions in Hospitality Research

• Predicting the impact of emerging technologies on the future of hospitality.
• Sustainable tourism trends for the post-pandemic era.
• The rise of experiential travel and its implications for hospitality businesses.
• Addressing overtourism through innovative destination management strategies.
• The role of regenerative tourism in combating climate change.
• Exploring alternative accommodation models (e.g., homestays, co-living spaces) in hospitality.
• The role of space tourism in the future of hospitality and destination management.
• Exploring the potential of vertical farming for sustainable food production in urban hotels.
• The impact of artificial intelligence on job displacement and workforce reskilling in hospitality.
• Predicting the evolution of hospitality design trends in response to changing consumer preferences.
• Assessing the feasibility of underwater hotels and other innovative accommodation concepts.
• The rise of immersive travel experiences and virtual reality tourism.

Why Is Hospitality Research Important?

Hospitality research is crucial for several reasons:

• Understanding Consumer Needs: Research helps businesses understand the evolving preferences, behaviors, and expectations of consumers in the hospitality industry. This understanding allows businesses to tailor their offerings and services to better meet the needs of their target audience.
• Improving Service Quality: By analyzing guest feedback, studying industry trends, and identifying areas for improvement, hospitality research enables businesses to enhance the quality of their services. This, in turn, leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Driving Innovation: Research drives innovation in the hospitality sector by uncovering new technologies, trends, and best practices. Businesses that stay abreast of the latest research findings can innovate their offerings, improve operational efficiency, and gain a competitive edge in the market.
• Sustainability Initiatives: With growing concerns about environmental and social sustainability, hospitality research plays a crucial role in identifying sustainable practices and initiatives. Research helps businesses reduce their environmental footprint, promote social responsibility, and contribute to the long-term viability of the industry.
• Informing Decision-Making: Hospitality research provides valuable insights that inform strategic decision-making at all levels of the organization. From marketing and branding to operations and management, research findings guide businesses in making informed choices that drive growth and success.
• Addressing Challenges: The hospitality industry faces numerous challenges, ranging from changing consumer preferences to regulatory compliance issues. Research helps businesses identify and address these challenges proactively, mitigating risks and optimizing performance.
• Contributing to Economic Development: The hospitality sector plays a significant role in global economies, contributing to employment, GDP, and tourism revenues. By generating knowledge and driving innovation, hospitality research contributes to the continued growth and development of the industry, creating opportunities for economic prosperity.

In conclusion, hospitality research is like a treasure chest full of exciting things to learn about. It gives us lots of chances to explore and find out new stuff. Whether you’re interested in understanding consumer behavior, exploring sustainability practices, or analyzing the latest technological trends, there’s something for everyone in this dynamic industry.

So, next time you check into a hotel or dine out at a restaurant, take a moment to appreciate the research and innovation that make your experience possible. With hospitality research topics, you could uncover exciting new opportunities you never knew existed.

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Recent Posts

Research trends of digital tourism: a bibliometric analysis

Tourism Critiques

ISSN : 2633-1225

Article publication date: 30 May 2023

Issue publication date: 27 November 2023

Discussions about digital tourism continue to increase among scholars as Information Communication and Technology (ICT) infrastructure develops. Dynamic changes due to technological aspects have given rise to various developments in the tourism industry. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the scientific structure of the development of digital tourism topics through a bibliometric analysis approach. In total, 102 publications from research on digital tourism were taken from Scopus database between 2001 and 2021, for further bibliometric analysis using the VOSviewer application. Interesting findings describe the most cited digital tourism publications, the contribution of digital tourism by various authors, institutions, countries, co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and co-occurrence for the main trends of digital tourism. This study compiles a detailed review of digital tourism research. This article adds substantial value to the digital tourism topic by analyzing bibliometric data. It provided scientific information regarding digital tourism for other researchers and future research.

• Digital tourism
• Tourism industry
• Bibliometric analysis

Roziqin, A. , Kurniawan, A.S. , Hijri, Y.S. and Kismartini, K. (2023), "Research trends of digital tourism: a bibliometric analysis", Tourism Critiques , Vol. 4 No. 1/2, pp. 28-47. https://doi.org/10.1108/TRC-11-2022-0028

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2023, Ali Roziqin, Alferdo Satya Kurniawan, Yana Syafriyana Hijri and Kismartini Kismartini.

Published in Tourism Critiques: Practice and Theory. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

1. Introduction

The rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) impacts all fields, including the tourism industry ( Alford and Jones, 2020 ; Bødker and Munar, 2014 ; Kalia et al. , 2022 ; Watkins et al. , 2018 ; Zhao, 2014 ). In the 21st century, the tourism industry is expected to transform information and engagement tools ( Dexeus, 2018 ; Navío-Marco et al. , 2018 ; van Nuenen and Scarles, 2021 ). Many industries rely on digital technologies to run their operations. Major economic segments use digital technologies to improve their capabilities ( Akhtar et al. , 2021 ). Currently, the industry trend is easy to access online or on the internet ( Belonozhko et al. , 2018 ). The online system provides interactive convenience and has a global reach at the speed of interaction between tourists ( Puspawati and Ristanto, 2018 ). Therefore, all entities need to adapt and innovate appropriately to survive in an era of uncertainty. It takes creativity and good promotional innovation (Del Vecchio et al. , 2015) because the digital era has given potential tourists the freedom to quickly and precisely obtain information on the internet ( Dexeus, 2018 ; Zhang, 2014 ).

Nowadays, tourists are getting smarter ( Pan, 2016 ), and those who understand the online concept can quickly obtain information through smartphones and tablet computers ( Watkins et al. , 2018 ). The travel industry also does not rely on offline but online ( Kayumovich et al. , 2020 ), and many countries are preparing a sizeable digital tourism market to compete and attract foreign tourists ( Huang and Liu, 2011 ). Marketing makes planning and developing tourism destinations easier ( Khurramov et al. , 2020 ). Many other conveniences accrue to vacationers who use digital tourism, such as the ability to skip the ticket counter and get straight to the attraction of their choice and the speed with which they may arrange their transportation and lodging.

According to united national world tourism organization (UNWTO) data, world tourism visitors reached 1.3 billion in 2001, while in 2021, it is estimated that 2.3 billion tourists have traveled. Tourists do not only travel conventionally but also online or using the internet. Li et al. (2020) explained that about 70 million and 14.2 million people in Japan and Taiwan use the internet. The concept cannot be separated from the role of the millennial generation ( Iorio et al. , 2020 ) targeted to increase tourism because most of this generation spends time in a digital environment ( Bennett et al. , 2008 ).

Information technology users are spread worldwide to market tourism by using digital tourism websites ( Mathew and Soliman, 2021 ; Ziyadin et al. , 2018 ). It is significant to be used in modern times because online information and communication development are straightforward ( Liu et al. , 2016 ). For example, smartphones and intelligent tourism are powerful tools for visitors to aid in traveling. The ownership of different technology devices impacts the contribution of mobile travel bookings to the entire travel industry ( Adeola and Evans, 2019 ).

The development of digital tourism in the past decade has increased following the trend of digitization in all fields. Many publications discuss the idea in various countries, but no research explains the scientific structure of the latest development trends. This study evaluates digital tourism to obtain scientific information and research mapping as input for developing topics using a bibliometric approach. The analysis is expected to provide an up-to-date view of a particular scientific topic based on a recognized bibliographic database/previous publication.

2. Literature review

Digital tourism is an information service system based on networks, technology and databases ( Adeola and Evans, 2019 ; Wu, 2020 ). It forms complex projects, from surveys and evaluation of tourism resources to planning ( Ziyadin et al. , 2018 ). Supporting service facilities needed are marketing of tourism product designs, protection of resources and the ecological environment related to geology and geomorphology, land use at all levels and transportation aspects ( Bounab et al. , 2020 ). Digital or electronic tourism (e-tourism) combines one of the fastest-growing technologies, such as telecommunications and information technology, the hospitality industry and strategic planning ( Happ and Ivancsóné Horváth, 2020 ; Mistilis et al. , 2014 ; Navío-Marco et al. , 2018 ). Digital tourism also can be defined as the use of technologies to improve the tourist experience ( Adeola and Evans, 2019 ).

The trend is an alternative by stakeholders due to the impact of the current spread of COVID-19 ( Akhtar et al. , 2021 ). Restricted mobility and social distancing significantly affect the decline of the world tourism industry sector ( Gössling et al. , 2020 ). Most people will use the internet and mobile devices to obtain information, explore, interact and experience travel ( Ruiz-Gómez et al. , 2018 ), such as millennials ( Ketter, 2020 ; Kim and Park, 2020 ). Veiga et al. (2017) conveyed that millennials have the potential to change the work pattern of the tourism industry with their strong digital skills. According to Liu et al. (2019) , they can share their travel experiences in one tourist destination through their social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, which can influence other people to be interested in visiting these tourist destinations. Therefore, there is a significant change in consumer behavior patterns ( Navío-Marco et al. , 2018 ) and a disruption in the tourism sector ( Buhalis et al. , 2019 ). For example, taking selfies posted on social media has become a new trend in tourism.

The use of digital information and communication technology also helps the development of tourism. An online system will reduce promotional costs, increase employee effectiveness and make ordering easier ( Watkins et al. , 2018 ). Customers can share information and research assessments based on purpose, quality of service in hotels and restaurants and environmental conditions through new technologies, such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs ( Dessovic and Egger, 2011 ). For travelers, technology may be a valuable tool in a variety of ways, including the acquisition of information on desired destinations, climate and weather patterns, hotels, scenery, geopolitical and economic situations, trip arrangements, online purchasing and payments and preserving memories ( Kumar and Kumar, 2020 ). On a peer-to-peer basis, digitizing tourism can also increase the sharing economy among actors ( van Nuenen and Scarles, 2021 ).

The use of technology can improve the tourist experience by posting recommendations for attractions on the Web or using reality technology ( Poux et al. , 2020 ). Examples are TripAdvisor, Airbnb, MakeMy Trip and other local apps. Additionally, the benefits of digital tourism attract tourists to digital experiences by building an environment that can be conducted interactively ( Stors and Baltes, 2018 ). Innovation, especially with information technology, has a positive impact on several sides of tourism.

3. Research methods

This study uses bibliometric analysis to search for the formal nature of the scientific domain in a rigorous, systematic and innovative way ( Leong et al. , 2021 ; Sánchez et al. , 2017 ) by using quantitative and qualitative analysis derived from publications on previous research ( Azizatun et al. , 2021 ; Herrera-Franco et al. , 2020 ; Leong et al. , 2021 ). Indicators, such as the total number of authors and publications, citations, institutions and countries, were used to analyze data. Research trends in this study focus on scientific structure in the specific field of digital tourism on a certain period, starts from the annual output and subject areas, top cite articles by the most productive authors, most contributing institutions and countries. Furthermore, bibliometric studies are carried out using a database and a specific period.

The bibliometric analysis shows a map of tourism’s distribution of knowledge structures, measurement and evaluation in some particular topic ( Robertson et al. , 2020 ). Several studies using the bibliometric approach in the tourism topic include ( Singh and Bashar, 2021 ) concerning e-tourism; ( Suban et al. , 2021 ) related to halal and Islam; ( Sánchez et al. , 2017 ) about wine; ( Liu and Li, 2020 ) and ( Khanra et al. , 2021 ) related to ecotourism;, ( Knani et al. , 2022 ) about the role artificial intelligence in hospitality and tourism; ( Herrera-Franco et al. , 2020 ) about geo-tourism; and ( Kalia et al. , 2022 ) about the past three decades of digital tourism.

Each of these studies has made a scientific contribution in looking at trends in specific topics and succeeded in providing comprehensive information. Especially from Kalia et al. (2022) argued that new research areas in digital tourism include consumer behavior, technology and sustainability, management of smart destinations and the internet as a platform for marketing and communication. When Kalia et al. (2022) analyzes the current direction of digital tourism research (2020), this study aims to evaluate the scientific structure of digital tourism based on the Scopus database (2021). Additionally, in the limitations, Kalia et al. (2022) used broad keywords that allow for bias in determining the number of articles reviewed. Therefore, in this study, we focus and specifically use the keyword digital tourism in searching for document titles to ensure the topics discussed are appropriate and minimize bias on other topics.

Data processing was carried out through data sets obtained from the Scopus database and then processed with VOSviewer. VOSViewer is used to construct and visualize the bibliometric network ( van Eck and Waltman, 2010 ), which will form information related to the field of study, developments and existing trends. Some of the features are cooccurrence, coauthorship and bibliographic coupling. According to Suban et al. (2021) , the VOS viewer graphically displays the nodal network through the use of two defined weights, such as the quantity and overall strength of the links. A lot of numbers of software for bibliometric analysis, such as Citespace, Bibexcel, Pajek, Gephi, SciMat, Sci2, R Studio and UCINET. Each software has its own advantages and deficiency; it is important depends on the case study or research questions ( Donthu et al. , 2021 ; Miraj et al. , 2020 ). The VOSviewer was chosen for usage in this study. The rationale is that, in comparison to other software tools, VOSviewer provides a large number of functions for visualizing bibliometric networks and scientifically mapping networks. Furthermore, the software has been used in several previous research studies and features a special text mining tool for visualizing bibliometric networks. For these reasons, this study thought VOSviewer was sufficient to meet its goals.

Scopus was selected as the index because it is the world’s largest abstract and citation database for peer-reviewed journals, books and conference proceedings. Another side, it offers in-depth information on the field’s global research output. Collecting the data set in the Scopus database, the authors provide a limit for two decades, namely, 2001–2021, to see the latest developments in the 21st century, where technology has become a culture and slowly enters all lines of human society. The Scopus data set was analyzed using MS Excel for data description, and the stages are described in detail in Figure 1 .

Substantively, the four stages in Figure 1 serve to map research on digital tourism with the keyword from the title category. The bibliometric method can provide a new mapping regarding the latest developments in digital tourism research and its position with other research topics ( Singh and Bashar, 2021 ). The bibliometric analysis will assist practitioners in discussing future digital tourism studies.

For the next chapter, the research results are divided into several sub-sections. First provides annual output and subject areas regarding digital tourism topic. Second, it discusses regarding top cited articles by the most productive authors. Third, the researcher discusses about most contributing institutions and countries from digital tourism research. Further, it discusses regarding bibliometric network analysis. Finally, based on the research cluster of digital tourism, the researcher proposes a future research agenda.

4. Results and discussion

4.1 annual output and subject areas.

Articles about digital tourism first appeared in 2004 ( Ghafoor et al. , 2004 ), discussing multiagent systems related to digital tourism, the development of intelligent agents to receive information quickly and agents that can provide insight by managing the system and transferring knowledge. In line with the discussion, the momentum of digital tourism should be assisted by human intelligence in managing digital aspects.

Based on Figure 2 , discussions and publications related to digital tourism continue to develop simultaneously. From 2007 to 2017, 33 articles were published by several authors, and the information is increasingly diverse with the existing linkages. In 2001–2010 digital tourism was about the usage of websites, desktop and laptop. In 2011–2021, it was more about social media, software applications and mobile phones. Some academics predicted that in the next decade, digital tourism will be about virtual reality ( Zhu et al. , 2023 ) and metaverse tourism ( Buhalis et al. , 2023 ). One important thing in this trend is the positive value of technology can provide innovations to the public (Del Vecchio et al. , 2015). Increasing the number of digital tourism articles since 2017 proves that many academics are starting to take an interest in the development of digital tourism.

Research on digital tourism gained momentum when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in 2020–2021. Restrictions and social activities have had a negative impact on the tourism industry ( Akhtar et al. , 2021 ; Gössling et al. , 2020 ). Digitalization of tourism is considered an alternative for tourism industry players. According to Akhtar et al. (2021) , future digital tourism research development will focus on using technology for marketing, mobile apps and virtual reality. Optimizing digital tourism for economic growth is using training and development for school and college students to increase awareness and create innovations.

The use of technology in digital tourism should adapt to the times ( Almeida-Santana et al. , 2020 ). Research on the concept continues to increase and is also influenced by the development of the internet and social media ( Adeola and Evans, 2019 ; Munar and Gyimóthy, 2013 ). In various countries, tourism industries are growing by using digital-based platforms as an alternative to marketing. The influence of digital information spreads quickly throughout the world. Most European Union countries purchase tourism services or packages online ( Ruiz-Gómez et al. , 2018 ). This arises from the massive development of information technology in various sectors of people’s lives, including tourism, which impacts consumer behavior patterns in accessing products or services.

Figure 3 shows the importance of discussing Digital Tourism’s multiperspective managing digital data. It does not only pay attention to or focus on one scope but relates to other scopes. The development has spread to social science, economics, business, management and accounting, arts and humanities. The discussion about digital tourism is dominated by social science, business, management and accounting and computer science ( Tosida et al. , 2020b ).

The development of digital tourism, combined with digital-based local wisdom, can positively impact the economic and business fields ( Subali et al. , 2018 ). The numbers are very multiperspective and not only related to technological developments.

4.2 Top cited articles by most productive authors

Based on the 102 scientific documents analyzed, Table 1 shows the top 10 articles or the most cited in the period based on the search, such as the article entitled “Progress in information technology and tourism management: 30 years on and 20 years after the internet – Revisiting Buhalis and Law’s landmark study about e-Tourism” by Navío-Marco et al. (2018) . The article has been cited or quoted 89 times, describing the analysis and evaluation of the sustainable development of tourism websites. The numerous citations are all global issues examined and studied urgently. Mistilis et al. (2014) articles titled “Future e-Destination Marketing: Perspective of an Australian Tourism Stakeholder Network” have been quoted or cited 60 times.

The high number of citations from each article indicates that it has a significant scientific influence on other research. This is because the topic is a strategic issue and has an established theoretical value, such as Navío-Marco et al. (2018) on trend and development of e-tourism, Mistilis et al. (2014) on stakeholder engagement and networks of e-tourism ( Watkins et al. , 2018 ) and ( Adeola and Evans, 2019 ) on tourism and ICT. Each article that gets the most citations mostly has an academic contribution for further research. Additionally, the influence of big names in publishing journals can also be a consideration for other researchers to cite as primary data.

For 20 years, studies on digital tourism have involved many authors. Figure 4 shows the ten most productive authors who often publish articles on the topic. Benyon, D is the most productive author producing four articles on digital tourism, especially the blended spaces framework ( Benyon et al. , 2014 ; O’Keefe and Benyon, 2015 ). In addition, one of the articles from Benyon, D entitled “Presence and digital tourism,” has been widely cited by other researchers as many as 35. Miao, F had four articles on fuzzy analysis hierarchy process (FAHP)-Based Digital Tourism Engineering Research, with the essential findings being seven factors. The main factors in evaluating digital tourism are infrastructure construction, data support, technology systems, application platforms, industrial size systems, security systems, planning and organization ( Miao et al. , 2009 ). Furthermore, Bon, A.T., and Ziyadin, S published three articles, and in the order of 5 to 10, two were produced articles by Adi, S; Andria, F; Ardiansyah. D; Blembayeva, A; Bonacini; Chen R. Even though the number of articles from the most authors only has four articles, each paper has made a consistent scientific contribution to further research, whether it is the theory used or the phenomenon being explained.

4.3 Most contributing institutions and countries

Reviving tourism potential using technological developments has attracted studies from different research institutes. Figure 5 shows that Edinburgh Napier and Chengdu University of Technology produced five and four articles. In order from 3 to 6, universities are donating three publications each. One of the publications from Al Farabi Kazakh National University discusses the main aspects of digital tourism modernization. The formation in Kazakhstan is environmentally oriented and uses near field communication (NFC) technology ( Madiyarova et al. , 2018 ). Even though Edinburg Napier University and Europe have the most significant number of documents, countries in the Asian region continue to conduct digital tourism studies.

Figure 6 shows the ten countries with the most contributors to published articles. China is at the top by donating 22 documents, followed by Spain, the USA, Indonesia, the UK, Australia, Germany, Kazakhstan and Malaysia. From the available data, European Union countries provide digital tourism articles. Indonesia and China also played a significant role in developing digital tourism. This follows the predictions that big countries such as Indonesia, the USA and China will dominate the world’s economic power in the next few years, including the tourism industry ( Giorgi et al. , 2020 ; Pramana et al. , 2021 ). The number of documents is only small evidence of the variations in the contribution of science to digital tourism, considering that the database used is only Scopus. Studies only focus on international recognition research; hence, several countries with the most documents are productive with internationally recognized standards (Scopus).

4.5 Bibliometric network analysis

Cooccurrence features are used on VOSviewer to create graphic maps based on the author and search for keywords to understand the relationship’s structure with the digital tourism concept cluster. Figure 7 shows the coauthorship analyzed using VOSviewer ( van Eck and Waltman, 2010 ) with a minimum threshold of two. Furthermore, the relationship between the authors will appear in Figure 6 , where Bon, A.T dominates by frequently conducting joint research with other authors. An example of research results from Bon, A.T, Hidayat, M, Tosida, E.T is “Strengthening the competitiveness of micro-businesses based on local wisdom through digital tourism education collaboration” ( Tosida et al. , 2020a ).

Figure 8 shows the related names with the same reference document, and the authors have interrelated references. The most numerous documents were Navio-Marco J in 2018, with publications explaining information technology and tourism management advances. The second was Mistilis N in 2014, which explained strategic efforts for tourism destinations to encourage digital tourism marketing ( Mistilis et al. , 2014 ).

Table 2 and Figure 9 explain the connectivity or coverage related to digital tourism. Each cluster has an interrelated concept in case studies of clusters 1 and 2 related to information communication technology in tourism. In a diverse global society, the transformation of information technology is a factor in economic development, especially tourism. Technological advances gave birth to the internet, contributing to tourism by providing information when planning a vacation ( Qian and Zhou, 2017 ). Information technology produces changes and new paradigms as opportunities and challenges in driving the tourism industry digitally ( Zolotovskiy et al. , 2020 ).

Clusters 3 and 4 explain digital tourism marketing, where digitalization in modern times is not rare. Digitalization can make it easier and expand tourism marketing ( Madiyarova et al. , 2018 ). By using digital marketing, marketing costs can be reduced rather than conventional methods. Tourists can easily see digital marketing, and the interest in visiting a tourist destination can be high. This is because substantive marketing can provide the understanding and persuasion to be interested in tourist destinations ( da Silva-Pina et al. , 2018 ). Therefore, digital tourism marketing is critical to boosting tourism destinations. Clusters 5 and 6 provide a general description of the innovations. The digital strategy is a managerial process of developing digital tourism to achieve benefits in specific tourist destinations and should also be able to run sustainably ( Bec et al. , 2019 ).

Professional human resources are needed to provide intelligent innovation. The development of digital tourist destinations applies not only to artificial tourist attractions but also to cultural or heritage tourism ( Chareyron et al. , 2020 ). Therefore, human resources will determine the direction of innovation that is developed. Clusters 7–10 provide information about digital tourism through a collaborative process in developing tourism destinations ( Gao et al. , 2010 ). The safety of tourists should be considered in digital tourism when developing tourism destinations. Applications or search sites regarding digital tourism should be provided with a security system when making transactions. It requires collaboration between tourism developers and the government or third parties to develop tourism destinations in line with a guaranteed security system ( Shrestha et al. , 2020 ).

Collaboration in developing tourism destinations can also be conducted using social media applications, and every smartphone user has a social media account ( Adi and Heripracoyo, 2018 ). Since the tourism industry cannot stand alone, good cooperation is needed for promoting and marketing digital tourism ( Stors and Baltes, 2018 ). In addition, this study explains potential future research regarding four topics, namely, millennials, marketing strategy, metaverse tourism and virtual tours which are quite far apart and not connected. It demonstrates that these four topics have not been extensively researched as of yet. At the same time, there are still few scholars who link other themes like sustainable tourism, technological innovation and tourism experience. This visualization certainly provides information for future researchers to adjust the research topics to be discussed, making it easier to find novelty or research gaps.

During the 2001–2010 period, as explained in Figure 2 , there were not many articles that discussed digital tourism in detail. In total, there are only eight documents, such as the development of mobile agents ( Ghafoor et al. , 2004 ) and the use of geospatial information technology to optimize digital tourism ( Chen et al. , 2009 ; Gao et al. , 2010 ). So, the trend in this decade is the geospatial technology system in digital tourism. Furthermore, in the 2011–2021 period, discussions regarding digital tourism began to appear significantly, starting in 2018, along with the massive development of information and communication technology in society. The research trend in this period is the use of the internet and innovation in the tourism sector, including the benefits of e-commerce and social media in supporting digital tourism. Some examples of papers in this period are Madiyarova et al. (2018) about modern trends in digital tourism; van Nuenen and Scarles (2021) regarding the advancement of digital media for tourism; and Almeida-Santana et al. (2020) about the new ecosystem of digital tourism.

5. Conclusion

This study evaluates and provides a comprehensive understanding of the latest digital tourism research consisting of annual output and subject areas, influential works, most productive authors, universities or institutions and most productive countries on the topic of digital tourism, as well as bibliometric analysis of digital tourism topic within the scope of the publication. Furthermore, this study uses bibliometric analysis reviewed using the VOSviewer and can provide a visualization analysis to scholars interested in digital tourism. There are 102 documents analyzed in the Scopus database and the cooccurrence, coauthorship and bibliographic coupling features. This comprehensive scientific information is helpful for further research to determine mapping research related to digital tourism.

This study found that the trend of digital tourism publications continues to increase. The topic is multidisciplinary, with the dominant areas being computer science, social sciences and business management. Many authors, universities and research institutes in various countries collaborate to conduct research related to digital tourism. Benyon, D and Miao, F are the top two authors who contribute most to digital tourism research based on the number of publications. Meanwhile, Edinburg Napier University is the most productive institution, with five published documents. China is the most productive country, and the topic of digital tourism has 10 clusters, with the dominant concept being communication technology in tourism.

This review demonstrated the fundamental developments in the field of digital tourism over the past two decades and provided the pertinent data that would be needed for future authors to publish their work. It is also intended to guide scholars interested in the topic of digital tourism by providing more space for contextual papers. For countries that are developing and will be develop digital tourism, they can make digital tourism models references in countries that have the highest number of publications, such as China, Spain and the UK, as confirms the findings of Kalia et al. (2022) . These can be started through collaboration between institutions, countries and practitioners in the digital tourism industry to conduct research and publication in journals to improve conditions and realistic needs in the field, especially for developing countries in the Asia, Africa and South America regions.

The findings increasingly emphasized that changes occur because developments in information technology make tourism move rapidly. The application of digital tourism is related to implementing information and communication technology in the tourism industry. Building on the work of other scholars, this study offers certain practical implications for tourism managers and policymakers. From a managerial perspective, this article suggests that business managers should formulate and execute more extensive strategies to cover the requirements all of tourists while, especially on millennial tourist, metaverse tourism and virtual tourism.

This bibliometric research finding might be used to educate tourist manager on how to respond to a new behavior of tourist in the digital era. They would get a competitive advantage as a result of this bibliometric. A growing number of research on the digital tourism sector in every country in the world, as well as cross-country studies between developed and developing countries, are greatly encouraged to make the industry more acceptable, profitable and sustainable.

Managers should consider applying for digital tourism based on cluster findings and research trend, for instance, communication technology as supported by ( Pawłowska-Legwand, 2020 ; Ruiz-Gómez et al. , 2018 ), tourism experience and virtual tour as argued by ( Knani et al. , 2022 ; Leal et al. , 2020 ; Zhu et al. , 2023 ), sustainable tourism as explained by ( Scott, 2014 ; Del Vecchio et al. , 2018 ) and website usability as supported by ( da Silva-Pina et al. , 2018 ). Furthermore, smart strategies should be used to improve access inclusively, including dealing with destinations that have internet network problems by building adequate digital infrastructure. For policymakers, the government should provide economic incentives such as low taxes for digital tourism industry developers, increase digital capacity for managers and everyone involved in the digital tourism industry, and help to overcome digital dividends by building digital infrastructure evenly. The government should also setup a committee that could develop, establish and monitor digital tourism development. The government should devise strategies to encourage digital tourism through a mature and comprehensive planning in reading the development of the tourism sector in the future.

5.1 Limitations and future research

This study uses only one reputable international database, namely, Scopus. Within the scope of reputable international publications, there are other international databases, such as Web of Science or Clarivate Analytics. Hence, further research can use several databases to cover this limitation. It is also limited by the period of the documents analyzed in the past 10 years and the specific topics, namely, digital tourism. The topic is selected due to the increasing use of information technology in the tourism sector. Bibliometric analysis cannot provide a detailed description of the development of specific topics due to various factors, especially in the practical aspect. This study can be essential for studying digital tourism, especially mapping relevant topics from previous research. Referring to the existing literature, future research on digital tourism should develop empirical studies to contribute to academic research and society, especially the role of social media and internet to improving the digital tourism sector.

Research stages and description

Annual digital tourism research results (2001–2021)

Field of digital tourism is based on the Scopus database

Most productive authors

10 most productive institutions

Documents by country (Top 10)

Coauthorship by country and author

Bibliographic coupling

Clustering concept item

Ten most cited article from scopus database

Authors	Title	Source	Theoretical framework	Cited
Navio-Marco, J., Ruiz- Górez, L.M., Sevilla- Sevilla, C.	Progress in information technology and tourism management: 30 years on and 20 years after the internet – Revisiting Buhalis and Law’s landmark study about e-Tourism	Tourism Management 69, pp. 460-470	Trend and Development of e-tourism	89
Mistilis, N., Buhalis, D., Gretzel, U.	Future eDestination Marketing: Perspective of an Australian Tourism Stakeholder Network	Journal of Travel Research 53(6), pp. 778-790	Stakeholder engagement and networks of e-tourism	60
Bec, A., Moye, B., Timms, K. (..) Stavronskaya, L., Lilttle, C.	Management of immersive heritage tourism experiences: A conceptual model	Tourism Management 72, pp. 117-120	Digital tourism experiences	45
Benyon, D., Quigley, A., O'Keefe, B., Riva, G.	Presence and digital tourism	Al and Society 29(4), pp. 521-529	Digital tourism and tourist experience	35
Watkins, M,, Ziyadin, 5., imalayeva, A., Kurmangalieva, A., Blembayeva, A.	Digital tourism as a key factor in the development of the economy	Economic Annals-XXI 169(1-2), pp. 40-45	Digital tourism (Tourism and ICT)	32
Ghafoor, A., Rehman, M.U., Khan, Z.A.,(…) Farooq Ahmad, H. Suguri, H.	SAGE: Next generation multi-agent system	Proceedings of International Conference on Paraleland Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications, PDPTA04 1, pp. 139-145	Multi-agent system in tourism	26
Del Vecchio, P., Mele, G., Ndou, V., Secundo, G.	Open Innovation and Social Big Data for Sustainability: Evidence from the Tourism Industry	Proceedings of International Conference on Paraleland Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications, PDPTA04 1, pp. 139-145	Open innovation and social big data in tourism	22
Adeola, O., Evans, O.	Digital tourism: mobile phones, internet and tourism in Africa	Tourism Recreation Research 44(2), pp. 190–202	ICT in tourism	18
Ketter, E.	Millennial travel: tourism micro-trends of European Generation Y	journal of Tourism Futures 7(2), pp. 192–196	Travel behaviors of Millennials in tourism	17
Hassan, A., Rahimi, R.	Consuming “Innovation” in Tourism: Augmented Reality as an Innovation Tool in Digital Tourism Marketing	Global Dynamics in Travel, Tourism, and Hospitality pp. 130–117	Technology innovation in tourism	17

Data retrieved from the Scopus database (October 18, 2021)