Progress on technology use in tourism

Purpose: With the rapid development and implementation of cutting-edge information technologies in tourism and hospitality, it is necessary to update the progress of technology use in the past 18 years and set up research agenda for future research. By adopting information systems (IS) as a reference discipline, this paper aims to create a literature review of technology and tourism papers around the theme of use.

Design/methodology/approach: Following the systematic literature review process of Aguinis et al. (2018), 314 papers were downloaded to determine how they applied the concept of technology use.

Findings: Three themes about technology use emerged: types of processing, organisational use and users. Among various types of technology processing, interactive and online are largely addressed in the tourism and hospitality literature. The organisational use theme explores how the competitive and strategic use of technology provides management support for organisations. There was a large amount of research focussed on direct users, such as individual characteristics, user attitudes and user behaviour. The theories of technology acceptance model and unified theory of acceptance and use of technology have been widely applied in these studies.

Originality/value: This paper provides a review of key issues which has been discussed in tourism research in relation to technology use. By applying the scheme developed in the IS discipline, this study provides new insights into the development of technology in tourism. In addition, it also gives us the opportunity to suggest a research agenda by identifying research gaps and future research collaboration opportunities between these two fields.