Research trends in technology in the context of smart destinations: a bibliometric analysis and network visualization

Information and communication technologies play a critical role in tourism, providing benefits such as improvement in tourism experiences, co-creation of value, and promotion of the marketing of relationships and phygital experiences, where online and offline environments are combined. In recent years, tourism planning and management through smart destinations has aroused great academic interest by including the dimensions of governance, sustainability, accessibility, innovation, and technology. This work aims to analyse and to visualize the scientific production associated with technology in the context of smart destinations. For this, evaluative and relational bibliometric analysis techniques were applied to the bibliographic data of 395 articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science up to September 2021. The results indicate that there is considerable growth and that a number of authors, countries, and leading institutions contribute significantly to scientific knowledge. In addition, using two bibliometric software tools, VOSviewer and SciMAT, a co-citation network of authors was built to describe their intellectual structure, and a keyword co-occurrence analysis was performed to identify the main thematic areas. The motor themes that drive the research are the conceptualization of tourist destinations, innovation, and data, while experience is a crosscutting theme. Additionally, some limitations and applications of the research are discussed, as well as the practical implications for destination management.