The use of big data in tourism: Current trends and directions for future research

Abstract

The aim of this research is to examine the new landscape that is taking shape in the tourism economy, due to the adoption of technological innovations. The technologies and systems used to make the most of the resulting interdisciplinary and multilingual big data, the methods by which heterogeneous elements from different sources are incorporated to bring new knowledge, and the modern services that are ultimately implemented and provided to the public, as well as the people involved in this process, and those who benefit from the new services are among the issues analyzed. The work is not limited to a simple mapping of space but concludes with an evaluation of the systems already implemented and the various methods of analysis and exploitation of large-scale data for this industry, which is based on detailed research of the current literature to identify the potential gaps for future research. This is a literature review. The authors have identified the content of this research on well-known online databases which include scholar, google and Scopus. They used the appropriate keywords such as “big data” & “tourism innovation” to reach the publications used in this research, also given attention on using recent papers which are derived from reliable journals. The research has concluded that the use of big data in the tourism sector is a rising trend. Big data creates expectations for a better understanding of tourism demand and the adjustment of supply by tourism companies to meet the demands of tourists and the profitable activity of tourism businesses. There is a need to examine how can big data help the hotels to deal with Covid-19 pandemic, which can be a topic for future research. Big data is one of the most recent trends on innovation, Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and knowledge management. Hence, there is a need to gather and analyze the existing publications which concern the tourist industry. The originality of this research stems from making an analysis of the current situation as well as it is a bridge to the future by making suggestions on how future research can be shaped. The key limitation of this research resides on that it focuses on the existing literature and used secondary data. However, it gives directions for the future research which can take place with primary data collection.