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Ecotourism and sustainable development: a scientometric review of global research trends

• Published: 21 February 2022
• Volume 25 , pages 2977–3003, ( 2023 )

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• Lishan Xu 1 , 2 ,
• Changlin Ao   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8826-7356 1 , 3 ,
• Baoqi Liu 1 &
• Zhenyu Cai 1  

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With the increasing attention and awareness of the ecological environment, ecotourism is becoming ever more popular, but it still brings problems and challenges to the sustainable development of the environment. To solve such challenges, it is necessary to review literature in the field of ecotourism and determine the key research issues and future research directions. This paper uses scientometrics implemented by CiteSpace to conduct an in-depth systematic review of research and development in the field of ecotourism. Two bibliographic datasets were obtained from the Web of Science, including a core dataset and an expanded dataset, containing articles published between 2003 and 2021. Our research shows that ecotourism has been developing rapidly in recent years. The research field of ecotourism spans many disciplines and is a comprehensive interdisciplinary subject. According to the research results, the evolution of ecotourism can be roughly divided into three phases: human disturbance, ecosystem services and sustainable development. It could be concluded that it has entered the third stage of Shneider’s four-stage theory of scientific discipline. The research not only identifies the main clusters and their advance in ecotourism research based on high impact citations and research frontier formed by citations, but also presents readers with new insights through intuitive visual images.

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1 Introduction

Ecotourism, which has appeared in academic literature since the late 1980s, is a special form of nature-based tourism that maintains the well-being of the local community while protecting the environment and provides tourists with a satisfying nature experience and enjoyment (Ceballos-Lascuráin, 1996 ; Higgins, 1996 ; Orams, 1995 ). With years of research and development, ecotourism has risen to be a subject of investigation in the field of tourism research (Weaver & Lawton, 2007 ). In 2002, the United Nations declared it the International Year of Ecotourism (IYE), and the professional Journal of Ecotourism was established in the same year.

With the progress and maturity of ecotourism as an academic research field, countless scholars have put forward standards and definitions for ecotourism (Sirakaya et al., 1999 ; Wight, 1993 ). The main objectives of ecotourism emphasize long-term sustainable development (Whitelaw et al., 2014 ), including the conservation of natural resources, the generation of economic income, education, local participation and the promotion of social benefits such as local economic development and infrastructure (Ardoin et al., 2015 ; Coria & Calfucura, 2012 ; Krüger, 2005 ; Oladeji et al., 2021 ; Ross & Wall, 1999 ; Valdivieso et al., 2015 ). It can also boost rural economies and alleviate poverty in developing countries (Snyman, 2017 ; Zhong & Liu, 2017 ).

With unrestricted increasing attention to the ecological environment and the improvement of environmental awareness, ecotourism is becoming ever more prevalent, and the demand for tourism is increasing year by year (CREST, 2019 ). This increase, however, leads to a number of environmental, social and economic challenges in the development of ecotourism. For example, due to the low public awareness of ecotourism, the increase in tourists has brought a series of negative impacts on the local ecological environment, culture and economy, including disrespect for local culture and environmental protection, as well as more infrastructure construction and economic burden to meet the needs of tourists (Ahmad et al., 2018 ; Chiu et al., 2014 ; Shasha et al., 2020 ; Xu et al., 2020 ). Such challenges and contradictions are urgent problems to be tackled by the sustainable development of ecotourism. Especially against the backdrop of the current pandemic, tourism has experienced a severe blow, but climate change and other environmental issues have not been improved (CREST, 2020 ). In this context, facing these challenges and difficulties, it is essential to re-examine the future development path of ecotourism, to explore how government agencies can formulate appropriate management policies while preserving the environment and natural resources to support sustainable tourism development. Accordingly, it is necessary to consult literature in the field of ecotourism to understand the research progress and fundamental research issues, to identify challenges, suitable methods and future research direction of ecotourism.

Some previous reviews of ecotourism offer a preview of research trends in this rapidly developing area. Weaver and Lawton ( 2007 ) provide a comprehensive assessment of the current state and future progress of contemporary ecotourism research, starting with the supply and demand dichotomy of ecotourism, as well as fundamental areas such as quality control, industry, external environment and institutions. Ardoin et al. ( 2015 ) conducted a literature review, analyzing the influence of nature tourism on ecological knowledge, attitudes, behavior and potential research into the future. Niñerola et al. ( 2019 ) used the bibliometric method and VOSviewer to study the papers on sustainable development of tourism in Scopus from 1987 to 2018, including literature landscape and development trends. Shasha et al. ( 2020 ) used bibliometrics and social network analysis to review the research progress of ecotourism from 2001 to 2018 based on the Web of Science database using BibExcel and Gephi and explored the current hot spots and methods of ecotourism research. These reviews have provided useful information for ecotourism research at that time, but cannot reflect the latest research trends and emerging development of ecotourism either of timeliness, data integrity, research themes or methods.

This study aims to reveal the theme pattern, landmark articles and emerging trends in ecotourism knowledge landscape research from macro- to micro-perspectives. Unlike previous literature surveys, from timeliness, our dataset contains articles published between 2003 and 2021, and it will reveal more of the trends that have emerged over the last 3 years. Updating the rapidly developing literature is important as recent discoveries from different areas can fundamentally change collective knowledge (Chen et al., 2012 , 2014a ). To ensure data integrity, two bibliographic datasets were generated from Web of Science, including a core dataset using the topic search and an expanded dataset using the citation expansion method, which is more robust than defining rapidly growing fields using only keyword lists (Chen et al., 2014b ). And from the research theme and method, our review focuses on the area of ecotourism and is instructed by a scientometric method conducted by CiteSpace, an analysis system for visualizing newly developing trends and key changes in scientific literature (Chen et al., 2012 ). Emerging trends are detected based on metrics calculated by CiteSpace, without human intervention or working knowledge of the subject matter (Chen et al., 2012 ). Choosing this approach can cover a more extensive and diverse range of related topics and ensure repeatability of analysis with updated data (Chen et al., 2014b ).

In addition, Shneider’s four-stage theory will be used to interpret the results in this review. According to Shneider’s four-stage theory of scientific discipline (Shneider, 2009 ), the development of a scientific discipline is divided into four stages. Stage I is the conceptualization stage, in which the objects and phenomena of a new discipline or research are established. Stage II is characterized by the development of research techniques and methods that allow researchers to investigate potential phenomena. As a result of methodological advances, there is a further understanding of objects and phenomena in the field of new subjects at this stage. Once the techniques and methods for specific purposes are available, the research enters Stage III, where the investigation is based primarily on the application of the new research method. This stage is productive, in which the research results have considerably enhanced the researchers’ understanding of the research issues and disclosed some unknown phenomena, leading to interdisciplinary convergence or the emergence of new research directions or specialties. The last stage is Stage IV, whose particularity is to transform tacit knowledge into conditional knowledge and generalized knowledge, so as to maintain and transfer the scientific knowledge generated in the first three stages.

The structure of this paper is construed as follows. The second part describes the research methods employed, the scientometric approach and CiteSpace, as well as the data collection. In the third part, the bibliographic landscape of the core dataset is expounded from the macroscopic to the microscopic angle. The fourth part explores the developments and emerging trends in the field of ecotourism based on the expanded dataset and discusses the evolution phase of ecotourism. The final part is the conclusion of this study. Future research of ecotourism is prospected, and the limitations of this study are discussed.

2 Methods and data collection

2.1 scientometric analyses and citespace.

Scientometrics is a branch of informatics that involves quantitative analysis of scientific literature in order to capture emerging trends and knowledge structures in a particular area of study (Chen et al., 2012 ). Science mapping tools generate interactive visual representations of complex structures by feeding a set of scientific literature through scientometrics and visual analysis tools to highlight potentially important patterns and trends for statistical analysis and visualization exploration (Chen, 2017 ). At present, scientometrics is widely used in many fields of research, and there are also many kinds of scientific mapping software widely used by researchers and analysts, such as VosViewer, SCI2, HistCite, SciMAT, Gephi, Pajek and CiteSpace (Chen, 2011 , 2017 ; Chen et al., 2012 ).

Among these tools, CiteSpace is known for its powerful literature co-citation analysis, and its algorithms and features are constantly being refined as it continues to evolve. CiteSpace is a citation visual analysis software developed under the background of scientometrics and data visualization to analyze the basics that are included in scientific analysis (Chen, 2017 ; Chen et al., 2012 ). It is specialized designed to satisfy the need for systematic review in rapidly changing complicated areas, particularly with the ability to identify and explain emerging trends and transition patterns (Chen et al., 2014a ). It supports multiple types of bibliometric research, such as collaborative network analysis, co-word analysis, author co-citation analysis, document co-citation analysis, and temporal and spatial visualization (Chen, 2017 ). Currently, CiteSpace has been extensively used in more than 60 fields, including computer science, information science, management and medicine (Abad-Segura et al., 2019 ; Chen, 2017 ).

In this paper, we utilize CiteSpace (5.8.R1) to analyze acquired bibliographies of ecotourism to study emerging trends and developments in this field. From macro to micro, from intuitive to complex, from whole to part and from general to special, the writing ideas are adopted. Figure  1 presented the specific research framework of this study.

The research framework of this study

2.2 Data collection

Typical sources of scientific literature are Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. Considering the quantity and quality of data, the Web of Science database was expected to provide the original data in this research. In order to comprehend the research status and development trends of ecotourism, this study systematically reviewed the ecotourism literature collected on the Web of Science Core Collection. The Web of Science Core Collection facilitates access to the world’s leading scholarly journals, books and proceedings of conferences in the sciences, social sciences, art, and humanities, as well as access to their entire citation network. It mainly includes Science Citation Index Expanded from 2003 to current and Social Sciences Citation Index from 2004 to present. Therefore, the data obtained in this study are from 2003 and were consulted on June 3, 2021.

In the process of data retrieval, it is frequently confronted with the choice between recall rate and precision rate. To address the problem of low recall rate in keyword or topic retrieval, Chen et al. ( 2014a , b ) expanded the retrieval results through ‘citation expansion’ and ‘comprehensive topic search’ strategies. However, when the recall rate is high, the accuracy rate will decrease correspondingly. In practical standpoint, instead of refining and cleaning up the original search results, a simpler and more efficient way is to cluster or skip these unrelated branches. Priority should be placed on ensuring recall rate, and data integrity is more important than data for accuracy. Therefore, two ecotourism documentation datasets, the core dataset and the expanded dataset, were obtained from the Web of Science by using comprehensive topic search and citation expansion method. The latter approach has been proved more robust than using keyword lists only to define fast-growing areas (Chen et al., 2014b ). A key bibliographic landscape is generated based on the core dataset, followed by more thorough research of the expanded dataset.

2.2.1 The core dataset

The core dataset was derived through comprehensive subject retrieval in Web of Science Core Collection. The literature type was selected as an article or review, and the language was English. The period spans 2003 to 2021. The topic search query is composed of three phrases of ecotourism: ‘ ecotour* ’ OR ‘ eco-tour* ’ OR ‘ ecological NEAR/5 tour* ’. The wildcard * is used to capture related variants of words, for example, ecotour, ecotourism, ecotourist and ecotourists. The related records that are requested include finding these terms in the title, abstract or keywords. The query yielded 2991 original unique records.

2.2.2 The expanded dataset

The expanded dataset includes the core dataset and additional records obtained by reference link association founded on the core dataset. The principle of citation expansion is that if an article cites at least one article in the core dataset, we can infer that it is related to the topic (Garfield, 1955 ). The expanded dataset is comprised of 27,172 unique records, including the core dataset and the articles that cited them. Both datasets were used for the following scientometrics analysis.

3 Bibliographic landscape based on the core dataset

The core dataset consists of a total of 2991 literature from 2003 to 2021. This study utilized the core dataset to conduct an overall understanding of the bibliographic landscape in the field of ecotourism.

3.1 Landscape views of core dataset

The distribution of the yearly publication of bibliographic records in the core and expanded datasets is presented in Fig.  2 . It can be observed that the overall number of ecotourism-related publications is on the rise, indicating that the scholarly community is increasingly interested in ecotourism. After 2018, the growth rate increased substantially. And in 2020, the number of publications in the expanded dataset is close to 5000, almost double that of 2017 and 5 times that of 2011. This displays the rapid development of research in the field of ecotourism in recent years, particularly after 2018, more and more researchers began to pay attention to this field, which also echoes the trend of global tourism development and environmental protection. With the increase in personal income, tourism has grown very rapidly, and with it, tourism revenue and tourist numbers, especially in developing states. For instance, the number of domestic tourists in China increased from 2.641 billion in 2011 to 6.06 billion in 2019, and tourism revenue increased from 1930.5 billion RMB in 2011 to 5725.1 billion RMB in 2019 (MCT, 2021 ). However, due to the lack of effective management and frequent human activities, the rapid development of tourism has led to various ecological and environmental problems, which require corresponding solutions (Shasha et al., 2020 ). This has played an active role in promoting the development of ecotourism and triggered a lot of related research. In addition, since 2005, the expanded dataset has contained numerous times as many references as the core dataset, demonstrating the importance of using citation expansion for literature retrieval in scientometric review studies.

The distribution of bibliographic records in core and expanded dataset. Note The data were consulted on June 3, 2021

The data were consulted on June 3, 2021

The dual-map overlay of scientific map literature as Fig.  3 shows, against the background of global scientific map from more than 10,000 journals covered by Web of Science, represents the distribution and connections on research bases and application fields across the entire dataset of the research topics (Chen & Leydesdorff, 2014 ). Colored lines are citation links, and numbered headings are cluster labels. On the left side is the journal distribution which cites literature, regarding the field application of ecotourism, mainly covers multiple disciplines such as 3. Ecology, Earth, Marine, 6. Psychology, Education, Health, 7. Veterinary, Animal Science and 10. Economics, Economic and Political. On the right side is the distribution of journals of cited literature, representing the research basis of ecotourism. As can be observed from the figure, ecotourism research is based on at least five disciplines on the right, including 2. Environmental, Toxicology, Nutrition, 7. Psychology, Education, Social, 8. Molecular, Biology, Genetics, 10. Plant, Ecology, Zoology and 12. Economics, Economic, Political. It can be viewed that the research field of ecotourism spans multiple disciplines and is a comprehensive and complex subject. The dual-map overlay provides a global visualization of literature growth of the discipline level.

A dual-map overlay of ecotourism literature

The total number of papers issued by a country or an institution reflects its academic focus and overall strength, while centrality indicates the degree of academic cooperation with others and the influence of published papers. The top 15 countries and institutions for the number of ecotourism papers published from 2003 to 2021 are provided in Table 1 . Similar to the study of Shasha et al. ( 2020 ), the ranking of the top six countries by the number of publications remains unchanged. As can be seen from the table, the USA ranks first in the world, far ahead in both the number of publications and the centrality. China ranks second in global ecotourism publications, followed by Australia, England, South Africa and Canada. While the latest data show that Taiwan (China), Turkey and South Korea appear on the list. Overall, the top 15 countries with the most publications cover five continents, containing a number of developed and developing, which shows that ecotourism research is receiving global attention. In terms of international academic cooperation and impact of ecotourism, Australia and England share second place, Italy and France share fourth place, followed by South Africa and Spain. China’s centrality is relatively low compared to the number of publications, ranking eighth. Academic cooperation between countries is of great significance. Usually, countries with high academic publishing level cooperate closely due to similar research interests. International academic cooperation has enhanced each other’s research capacity and promoted the development of ecotourism research. Therefore, although some countries have entered this list with the publication number, they should attach importance to increase academic cooperation with other countries and improving the international influence of published papers.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences and its university are the most prolific when it draws to institutions’ performance. It is the most important and influential research institute in China, especially in the field of sustainable development science. Australia has four universities on the list, with Griffith University and James Cook University in second and third place. USA also includes four universities, with the University of Florida in fourth place. South Africa, a developing country, gets three universities, with the University of Cape Town and the University of Johannesburg fifth and sixth, respectively. In comparison with previous studies (Shasha et al., 2020 ), Iran and Mexico each have one university in the ranking, replacing two universities in Greece, which means that the importance and influence of developing countries in the field of ecotourism is gradually rising. Based on the above results, it can be summarized that the USA, China, Australia and South Africa are relatively active countries in the field of ecotourism, and their development is also in a relatively leading position.

3.2 Most active topics

The foam tree map and the pie chart of the focal topics of ecotourism based on the core dataset generated by Carrot2 through the title of each article is illustrated in Fig.  4 . Developing and developed, case study, protected areas, sustainable tourism, tourism development and developing ecotourism are leading topics in the field of ecotourism research, as well as specific articles under the main topics. The lightweight view generated by Carrot2 provides a reference for the research, and then, co-word analysis is employed to more specifically reflect the topics in the research field.

Foam tree map and pie chart of major topics on ecotourism

The topics covered by ecotourism could be exposed by the keywords of the articles in the core dataset. Figure  5 displays the keywords analysis results generated based on the core dataset. From the visualization results in the figure, it can infer that ecotourism, conservation, tourism, management, protected area, impact, biodiversity, sustainability, national park and community are the ten most concerned topics. Distinct colors set out at the time of co-citation keywords first appear, and yellow is generated earlier than red. In addition, Fig.  5 can also reflect the development and emerging topics in the research field, such as China, Mexico, South Africa and other hot countries for ecotourism research; ecosystem service, economic value, climate change, wildlife tourism, rural tourism, forest, marine protected area and other specific research directions; valuation, contingent valuation, choice experiment and other research methods; willingness to pay, preference, benefit, perception, attitude, satisfaction, experience, behavior, motivation, risk, recreation and other specific research issues.

A landscape view of keywords based on the core dataset

4 Emerging trends and developments based on the expanded dataset

The expanded dataset, consisting of 27,172 records, is approximately nine times larger than the core dataset. This research applies the expanded dataset to profoundly explore the emerging trends and developments of ecotourism.

4.1 Keywords with citation bursts

Detection of citation bursts can indicate both the scientific community’s interest in published articles and burst keywords as an indicator of emerging tendencies. Figure  6 displays the top 30 keywords with the strongest citation bursts in the expanded dataset. Since 2003, a large number of keywords have exploded. Among them, the strongest bursts include ecotourism, bird, disturbance, reserve, Africa, challenge, sustainable development and strategy. Keywords with citation burst after 2017 are experience, challenge, sustainable development, willingness to pay, perspective, strategy, quality and satisfaction, which have continued to this day. The results indicate dynamic development and emerging trends in research hotspots in the field of ecotourism.

Top 30 keywords with the strongest citation bursts

4.2 References with citation bursts

Figure  7 sets out the top 30 references in the expanded dataset with citation bursts. The articles with the fastest growing citations can also contribute to describe the dynamics of a field. References with high values in strength column are important milestones of ecotourism research. The two articles with strong citation bursts prior to 2010 focused on the human impact on the environment and animals. West et al. ( 2006 ) discussed the relationship between parks and human beings and the social impact of protected areas, and Köndgen et al. ( 2008 ) studied the decline of endangered great apes caused by a human pandemic virus. The paper with the strongest citation burst in the entire expanded dataset was released by Fairhead et al. ( 2012 ), which looked at ‘green grabbing,’ the appropriation of land and resources for environmental purposes. Milcu et al. ( 2013 ) conducted a semi-quantitative review of publications dealing with cultural ecosystem services with the second strongest citation burst, which concluded that the improvement of the evaluation method of cultural ecosystem service value, the research on the value of cultural ecosystem service under the background of ecosystem service and the clarification of policy significance were the new themes of cultural ecosystem service research. In addition, many articles with citation burst discussed the evaluation method of ecosystem services value (Costanza et al., 2014 ; Groot et al., 2010 ), the evaluation of cultural ecosystem service value (Plieninger et al., 2013 ) and its role in ecosystem service evaluation (Chan et al., 2012 ; Chan, Guerry, et al., 2012 ; Chan, Satterfield, et al., 2012 ; Chan, Satterfield, et al., 2012 ; Daniel et al., 2012 ). The most fresh literature with strong citation burst is the article of D’Amato et al. ( 2017 ) published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, which compared and analyzed sustainable development avenues such as green, circular and bio economy. In addition, it is worthwhile noting the use of R in ecotourism, with the persuasive citation burst continuing from 2012 to the present, as indicated by the orange arrow in Fig.  7 .

Top 30 references with the strongest citation bursts

4.3 Landscape view of co-citation analysis

The landscape view of co-citation analysis of Fig.  8 is generated based on the expanded dataset. Using g -index ( k  = 25) selection criteria in the latest edition of CiteSpace, an annual citation network was constructed. The final merged network contained 3294 links, 2122 nodes and 262 co-citation clusters. The three largest linked components cover 1748 connected nodes, representing 82% of the entire network. The modularization degree of the synthetic network is 0.8485, which means that co-citation clustering can clearly define each sub-field of ecotourism. Another weighted mean silhouette value of the clustering validity evaluation is 0.9377, indicating that the clustering degree of the network is also very superior. The harmonic mean value amounts to 0.8909.

A landscape view of the co-citation network based on the expanded dataset

In the co-citation network view, the location of clusters and the correlation between clusters can show the intellectual structure in the field of ecotourism, so that readers can obtain an overall understanding of this field. The network falls into 25 co-citation clusters. The tags for each cluster are generated founded on the title, keywords and abstract of the cited article. Color-coded areas represent the time of first appeared co-citation links, with gray indicating earlier and red later. The nodes in the figure with red tree rings are references to citation bursts.

4.4 Timeline view

In order to further understand the time horizon and study process of developing evolution on clusters, after the generation of co-citation cluster map, the Y -axis is cluster number and the year of citation publication is X -axis, so as to obtain the timeline view of the co-citation network, shown as Fig.  9 . Clusters are organized vertically from largest to smallest. The color curve represents co-citation link coupled with corresponding color year, with gray representing earlier and red representing newer. Larger nodes and nodes with red tree rings indicate high citation or citation burst. The three most cited references of the year demonstrate below each node, in vertical order from least to most.

A timeline visualization of the largest clusters

The timeline view provides a reasonably instinctual and insightful reference to understand the evolutionary path of every subdomain. Figure  9 shows 19 clusters ranging from #0 to #18, with #0 being the largest cluster. As can be seen from the figure, the sustainability and activeness of each cluster are contrasting. For example, the largest cluster has been active since 2006, while the gray and purple clusters are no longer active.

4.5 Major clusters

Taking clustering as a unit and analyzing at the level of clustering, specifically selecting large or new type clustering, is the foothold of co-citation analysis, which can help to understand the principal and latest research fields related to ecotourism. Table 2 displays a summary of the foremost 19 clusters, the first nine of which are all over 100 in size. The silhouette score of all clusters is greater than 0.8, indicating that the homogeneity of each cluster is high. The mean year is the average of the publication dates of references in the cluster. By combining the results in Table 2 , Figs.  8 and 9 , it can be observed that the five largest clusters are #0 cultural ecosystem services, #1 large carnivore, #2 human disturbance, #3 whale shark and #4 ecosystem service. A recent topic is cluster #16 COVID-19 pandemic. #11 Ecological footprint and #14 social media are two relatively youthful fields.

The research status of a research field can be demonstrated by its knowledge base and research frontier. The knowledge base consists of a series of scholarly writing cited by the corresponding article, i.e., cited references, while the research frontier is the writing inspired by the knowledge base, i.e., citing articles. Distinct research frontiers may come from the same knowledge base. Consequently, each cluster is analyzed based on cited references and citing articles. The cited references and citing articles of the five largest clusters are shown in Online Appendix A. Fig a) lists the 15 top cited references with the highest Σ (sigma) value in the cluster, where Σ value indicates that the citation is optimal in terms of the comprehensive performance of structural centrality and citation bursts. Fig b) shows the major citing articles of cluster. The citation behavior of these articles determines the grouping of cited literature and thus forms the cluster. The coverage is the proportion of member citations cited by citing articles.

4.6 Phase evolution research

Through the above analysis of the core dataset and the expanded dataset of ecotourism, we can see the development and evolution of the research field of ecotourism. The research process of ecotourism has gone through several stages, and each stage has its strategic research issues. Research starts with thinking about the relationship between humans and nature, moves to study it as a whole ecosystem, and then explores sustainable development. Hence, the evolution of ecotourism can be roughly parted into three phases.

4.6.1 Phase I: Human disturbance research stage (2003–2010)

This phase of research concentrates on the influence of human activities such as ecotourism on the environment and animals. Representative keywords of this period include ecotourism, human disturbance, response, coral reef, bird, disturbance, recreation, reserve, park, South Africa and people. Representative articles are those published by West et al. ( 2006 ) and Köndgen et al. ( 2008 ) of human impact on the environment and animals. The representative clustering is #2 human disturbance, which is the third largest one, consisting of 130 cited references from 1998 to 2012 with the average year of 2004. This cluster has citation bursts between 2002 and 2010 and has been inactive since then. As showed in Fig S3 a) and b), the research base and frontier are mainly around the impact of human disturbances such as ecotourism on biology and the environment (McClung et al., 2004 ). And as showed in Fig.  8 and Fig.  9 , clusters closely related to #2 belong to this phase and are also no longer active, such as #5 off-road vehicle, #6 protected area, #10 poverty reduction and #12 sustainable lifestyle.

4.6.2 Phase II: Ecosystem services research stage (2011–2015)

In this stage, the content of ecotourism research is diversified and exploded. The research is not confined to the relationship between humans and nature, but begins to investigate it as an entire ecosystem. In addition, some specific or extended areas began to receive attention. Typical keywords are abundance, resource, Africa, risk, predation, consequence and science. The most illustrative papers in this stage are Fairhead et al. ( 2012 )’s discussion on green grabbing and Milcu et al. ( 2013 )’s review on cultural ecosystem services. Other representative papers in this period focused on the evaluation methods of ecosystem service value and the role of cultural ecosystem service in the evaluation of ecosystem service value. Most of the larger clusters in the survey erupted at this stage, including #0 cultural ecosystem services, #1 large carnivore, #3 whale shark, #4 ecosystem services. Some related clusters also belong to this stage, such as #7 neoliberal conservation, #8 responsible behavior, #9 tourism development, #13 mangrove forest, #15 volunteer tourism, #17 circular economy and #18 telecoupling framework.

Cluster #0 cultural ecosystem services are the largest cluster in ecotourism research field, containing 157 cited references from 2006 to 2019, with the mean year being 2012. It commenced to have the citation burst in 2009, with high cited continuing until 2019. Cultural ecosystem services are an essential component of ecosystem services, including spiritual, entertainment and cultural benefits. Thus, in Fig.  8 , the overlap with #4 ecosystem services can obviously be seen. In Cluster #0, many highly cited references have discussed the trade-offs between natural and cultural ecosystem services in ecosystem services (Nelson et al., 2009 ; Raudsepp-Hearne et al., 2010 ) and the important role of cultural ecosystem services in the evaluation of ecosystem services value (Burkhard et al., 2012 ; Chan, Guerry, et al., 2012 ; Chan, Satterfield, et al., 2012 ; Fisher et al., 2009 ; Groot et al., 2010 ). As non-market value, how to evaluate and quantify cultural ecosystem services is also an important issue (Hernández-Morcillo et al., 2012 ; Milcu et al., 2013 ; Plieninger et al., 2013 ). Besides, the exploration of the relationship among biodiversity, human beings and ecosystem services is also the focus of this cluster research (Bennett et al., 2015 ; Cardinale et al., 2012 ; Díaz et al., 2015 ; Mace et al., 2012 ). The citing articles of #0 indicate the continued exploration of the connotation of cultural ecosystem services and their value evaluation methods (Dickinson & Hobbs, 2017 ). It is noteworthy that some articles have introduced spatial geographic models (Havinga et al., 2020 ; Hirons et al., 2016 ) and social media methods (Calcagni et al., 2019 ) as novel methods to examine cultural ecosystem services. In addition, the link and overlap between #0 cultural ecosystem service and #17 circular economy cannot be overlooked.

Ecosystem services relate to all the benefits that humans receive from ecosystems, including supply services, regulatory services, cultural services and support services. Research on cultural ecosystem services is based on the research of ecosystem services. It can be viewed in Fig.  9 that the research and citation burst in #4 was all slightly earlier than #0. Cluster #4 includes 118 references from 2005 to 2019, with an average year of 2011. In its research and development, how to integrate ecosystem services into the market and the payment scheme to protect the natural environment is a significant research topic (Gómez-Baggethun et al., 2010 ). In Cluster #4, the most influential literature provides an overview of the payment of ecosystem services (PES) from theory to practice by Engel et al. ( 2008 ). Many highly cited references have discussed PES (Kosoy & Corbera, 2010 ; Muradian et al., 2010 ), including the effectiveness of evaluation (Naeem et al., 2015 ), social equity matters (Pascual et al., 2014 ), the suitability and challenge (Muradian et al., 2013 ), and how to contribute to saving nature (Redford & Adams, 2009 ). The cluster also includes studies on impact assessment of protected areas (Oldekop et al., 2016 ), protected areas and poverty (Brockington & Wilkie, 2015 ; Ferraro & Hanauer, 2014 ), public perceptions (Bennett, 2016 ; Bennett & Dearden, 2014 ) and forest ecosystem services (Hansen et al., 2013 ). The foremost citing articles confirm the dominant theme of ecosystem services, especially the in-depth study and discussion of PES (Muniz & Cruz, 2015 ). In addition, #4 is highly correlated with #7 neoliberal protection, and Fairhead et al. ( 2012 ), a representative article of this stage, belongs to this cluster.

As the second largest cluster, Cluster #1 contains 131 references from 2008 to 2019, with the median year of 2014. As Fig S2 a) shows, the highly cited literature has mainly studied the status and protection of large carnivores (Mace, 2014 ; Ripple et al., 2014 ), including the situation of reduction (Craigie et al., 2010 ), downgrade (Estes et al., 2011 ) and even extinction (Dirzo et al., 2014 ; Pimm et al., 2014 ), and the reasons for such results, such as tourist visits (Balmford et al., 2015 ; Geffroy et al., 2015 ) and the increase in population at the edge of the protected areas (Wittemyer et al., 2008 ). The conservation effects of protected areas on wildlife biodiversity (Watson et al., 2014 ) and the implications of tourist preference heterogeneity for conservation and management (Minin et al., 2013 ) have also received attention. It is worth noting that the high citation rate of a paper using R to estimate the linear mixed-effects model (Bates et al., 2015 ) and the use of R in this cluster. The relationship between biodiversity and ecotourism is highlighted by the representative citing articles in research frontier of this cluster (Chung et al., 2018 ).

Cluster #3 refers to marine predator, and as shown in Fig.  8 , which has a strong correlation with #1. A total of 125 references were cited from 2002 to 2018, with an average year of 2011. References with high citation in #3 mainly studied the extinction and protection of marine life such as sharks (Dulvy et al., 2014 ), as well as the economic value and ecological impact of shark ecotourism (Clua et al., 2010 ; Gallagher & Hammerschlag, 2011 ; Gallagher et al., 2015 ). The paper published by Gallagher et al. ( 2015 ) is both the highly cited reference and main citing article, mainly focusing on the impact of shark ecotourism. It is also noteworthy that #6 protected area, #13 mangrove forest and #29 Mediterranean areas are highly correlated with these two clusters (Fig.  8 ).

Moreover, some clusters are not highly correlated with other clusters, but cannot be neglected at this stage of research. Cluster #8 responsible behavior includes 107 citations with the average year 2013, and mainly studied environmentally responsible behaviors in ecotourism (Chiu et al., 2014 ). Cluster #9 tourism development contains 97 cited references with mean year of 2015, focusing on the impact of such factors as residents’ perception on tourism development (Sharpley, 2014 ). Cluster #15 volunteer tourism consists of 52 citations, with an average year of 2011, which mainly considers the role of volunteer tourism in tourism development and sustainable tourism (Wearing & McGehee, 2013 ). Cluster #18 telecoupling framework has 26 cited references with the mean year being 2015, and the application of the new integrated framework of telecoupling Footnote 1 in ecotourism can be seen (Liu et al., 2015 ).

At this stage, it can be seen that the research field of ecotourism begins to develop in the direction of diversification, including the value evaluation and related research of ecosystem services and cultural ecosystem services, as well as the exploration of wild animals and plants, marine animals and plants and biodiversity. Neoliberal conservation, tourists’ responsible behavior, tourism development, volunteer tourism and circular economy are all explored. Some new research methods have also brought fresh air to this field, such as the introduction of spatial geographic models and social media methods, the discussion of economic value evaluation methods, the widespread use of R and the exploration of telecoupling framework. Therefore, from this stage, research in the field of ecotourism has entered the second stage of scientific discipline development (Shneider, 2009 ), featured by the use and evolution of research tools that can be used to investigate potential phenomena.

4.6.3 Phase III: Sustainable development research stage (2016 to present)

This stage of research continues to explore a series of topics of the preceding phase and further extends the research field on this basis. The keywords at this stage are politics, marine protected area and valuation. Some other keywords are still very active today, such as experience, challenge, sustainable development, willingness to pay, perspective, strategy, quality and satisfaction. The representative article is about sustainable development published by D'Amato et al. ( 2017 ), as shown in Fig.  8 belonging to #17 circular economy. The emerging clusters in this period are #11 ecological footprint, #14 social media and #16 COVID-19 pandemic. Cluster #11 contains 70 cited references from 2013 to 2020 with the mean year 2017. This clustering study mainly used the ecological footprint as an environmental indicator and socioeconomic indicators such as tourism to investigate the hypothesis of environmental Kuznets curve (Ozturk et al., 2016 ; Ulucak & Bilgili, 2018 ). Cluster #14 includes 52 cited references, with an average year of 2016. It can be seen that the introduction of social media data has added new color to research in the field of ecotourism, such as using social media data to quantify landscape value (Zanten et al., 2016 ) and to understand tourists’ preferences for the experience of protected areas (Hausmann et al., 2018 ), as well as from a spatial perspective using social media geo-tagged photos as indicators for evaluating cultural ecosystem services (Richards & Friess, 2015 ). As the latest and most concerned topic, cluster #16 contains 48 cited references, with mean year of 2018. This cluster mainly cites research on over-tourism (Seraphin et al., 2018 ) and sustainable tourism (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2018 ) and explores the impact of pandemics such as COVID-19 on global tourism (Gössling et al., 2021 ).

These emerging clusters at this phase bring fresh thinking to the research of ecotourism. First of all, the analysis of ecological footprint provides a tool for measuring the degree of sustainability and helps to monitor the effectiveness of sustainable programs (Kharrazi et al., 2014 ). Research and exploration of ecological footprint in ecotourism expresses the idea of sustainable development and puts forward reasonable planning and suggestions by comparing the demand of ecological footprint with the carrying capacity of natural ecosystem. Secondly, the use of social media data brings a new perspective of data acquisition to ecotourism research. Such large-scale data acquisition can make up for the limitations of sample size and data sampling bias faced by survey data users and provide a new way to understand and explore tourist behavior and market (Li et al., 2018 ). Finally, the sudden impact of COVID-19 in 2020 and its long-term sustainability has dealt a huge blow to the tourism industry. COVID-19 has highlighted the great need and value of tourism, while fundamentally changing the way destinations, business and visitors plan, manage and experience tourism (CREST, 2020 ). However, the stagnation of tourism caused by the pandemic is not enough to meet the challenges posed by the environment and the climate crisis. Therefore, how to sustain the development of tourism in this context to meet the challenges of the environment and climate change remains an important issue in the coming period of time. These emerging clusters are pushing the boundaries of ecotourism research and the exploration of sustainable development in terms of research methods, data collection and emerging topics.

Despite the fact that the research topics in this stage are richer and more diversified, the core goal of research is still committed to the sustainable development of ecotourism. The introduction of new technologies and the productive results have led to a much-improved understanding of research issues. All this commemorates the entrance of research into the third stage of the development of scientific disciplines (Shneider, 2009 ). In addition to continuing the current research topics, the future development of the field of ecotourism will continue to focus on the goal of sustainable development and will be more diversified and interdisciplinary.

5 Conclusion

This paper uses scientometrics to make a comprehensive visual domain analysis of ecotourism. The aim is to take advantage of this method to conduct an in-depth systematic review of research and development in the field of ecotourism. We have enriched the process of systematic reviews of knowledge domains with features from the latest CiteSpace software. Compared with previous studies, this study not only updated the database, but also extended the dataset with citation expansion, so as to more comprehensively identify the rapidly developing research field. The research not only identifies the main clusters and their advance in ecotourism research based on high impact citations and research frontiers formed by citations, but also presents readers with new insights through intuitive visual images. Through this study, readers can swiftly understand the progress of ecotourism, and on the basis of this study, they can use this method to conduct in-depth analysis of the field they are interested in.

Our research shows that ecotourism has developed rapidly in recent years, with the number of published articles increasing year by year, and this trend has become more pronounced after 2018. The research field of ecotourism spans many disciplines and is a comprehensive interdisciplinary subject. Ecotourism also attracts the attention of numerous developed and developing countries and institutions. The USA, China, Australia and South Africa are in a relatively leading position in the research and development of ecotourism. Foam tree map and pie chart of major topics, and the landscape view of keywords provide the hotspot issues of the research field. The development trend of ecotourism is preliminarily understood by detecting the citation bursts of the keywords and published articles. Co-citation analysis generates the main clusters of ecotourism research, and the timeline visualization of these clusters provides a clearer view for understanding the development dynamics of the research field. Building on all the above results, the research and development of ecotourism can be roughly divided into three stages: human disturbance, ecosystem services and sustainable development. Through the study of keywords, representative literature and main clusters in each stage, the development characteristics and context of each stage are clarified. From the current research results, we can catch sight that the application of methods and software in ecotourism research and the development of cross-field. Supported by the Shneider’s four-stage theory of scientific discipline (Shneider, 2009 ), it can be thought that ecotourism is in the third stage. Research tools and methods have become more potent and convenient, and research perspectives have become more diverse.

Based on the overall situation, research hotspots and development tendency of ecotourism research, it can be seen that the sustainable development of ecotourism is the core issue of current ecotourism research and also an important goal for future development. In the context of the current pandemic, the tourism industry is in crisis, but crisis often breeds innovation, and we must take time to reconsider the way forward. As we look forward to the future of tourism, we must adopt the rigor and dedication required to adapt to the pandemic, adhering to the principles of sustainable development while emphasizing economic reliability, environmental suitability and cultural acceptance. Post-COVID, the competitive landscape of travel and tourism will change profoundly, with preventive and effective risk management, adaptation and resilience, and decarbonization laying the foundation for future competitiveness and relevance (CREST, 2020 ).

In addition, as can be seen from the research and development of ecotourism, the exploration of sustainable development increasingly needs to absorb research methods from diverse fields to guide the formulation of policy. First of all, how to evaluate and quantify ecotourism reasonably and scientifically is an essential problem to be solved in the development of ecotourism. Some scholars choose contingent valuation method (CVM) and choice experiment (CE) in environmental economics to evaluate the economic value of ecotourism, especially non-market value. In addition, the introduction of spatial econometrics and the use of geographic information system (GIS) provide spatial scale analysis methods and results presentation for the sustainable development of ecotourism. The use of social media data implies the application of big data technology in the field of ecotourism, where machine learning methods such as artificial neural networks (ANN) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) are increasingly being applied (Talebi et al., 2021 ). The measurement of ecological footprint and the use of telecoupling framework provide a reliable way to measure sustainable development and the interaction between multiple systems. These approaches all have expanded the methodological boundaries of ecotourism research. It is worth noting that R, as an open source and powerful software, is favored by scholars in the field of ecotourism. This programming language for statistical computation is now widely used in statistical analysis, data mining, data processing and mapping of ecotourism research.

The scientometrics method used in this study is mainly guided by the citation model in the literature retrieval dataset. The range of data retrieval exercises restraint by the source of retrieval and the query method utilized. While current methods can meet the requirements, iterative query optimization can also serve to advance in the quality of the data. To achieve higher data accuracy, the concept tree function in the new version of CiteSpace can also serve to clarify the research content of each clustering (Chen, 2017 ). In addition, the structural variation analysis in the new edition is also an interesting study, which can show the citation footprints of typical high-yielding authors and judge the influence of the author on the variability of network structure through the analysis of the citation footprints (Chen, 2017 ).

Availability of data and material

The data that support the findings of this study are available from Web of Science.

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Xu, L., Ao, C., Liu, B. et al. Ecotourism and sustainable development: a scientometric review of global research trends. Environ Dev Sustain 25 , 2977–3003 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-022-02190-0

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Big data in tourism marketing: past research and future opportunities

Spanish Journal of Marketing - ESIC

ISSN : 2444-9695

Article publication date: 9 January 2023

The purpose of this study was to uncover representative emergent areas and to examine the research area of marketing, tourism and big data (BD) to assess how these thematic areas have developed over a 27-year time period from 1996 to 2022. This study analyzed 1,152 studies to identify the principal thematic areas and emergent topics, principal theories used, predominant forms of analysis and the most productive authors in terms of research.

Design/methodology/approach

The articles for this research were all selected from the Web of Science database. A systematic and quantitative literature review was performed. This study used SciMAT software to extract indicators. Specifically, this study analyzed productivity and produced a science map.

The findings suggest that interest in this area has increased gradually. The outputs also reveal the innovative effort of industry in new technologies for developing models for tourism marketing. Ten research areas were identified: “destination marketing,” “mobility patterns,” “co-creation,” “gastronomy,” “sustainability,” “tourist behavior,” “market segmentation,” “artificial neural networks,” “pricing” and “tourist satisfaction.”

Originality/value

This work is unique in proposing an agenda for future research into tourism marketing research with new technologies such as BD and artificial intelligence techniques. In addition, the results presented here fill the current gap in the research since while there have been literature reviews covering tourism with BD or marketing, these areas have not been studied as a whole.

El objetivo de esta investigación fue descubrir nichos representativos de áreas emergentes y examinar el área de Marketing, Turismo y Big Data, evaluando cómo han evolucionado estas áreas temáticas durante un período de 27 años desde 1996–2022. Analizamos 1.152 investigaciones para identificar las principales áreas temáticas y temas emergentes, las principales teorías utilizadas, las formas de análisis predominantes y los autores más productivos en términos de investigación.

Metodología

Todos los artículos para esta investigación fueron seleccionados de la base de datos Web of Science. Realizamos una revisión sistemática y cuantitativa de la literatura. Utilizamos el software SciMAT para extraer indicadores. Específicamente, analizamos la productividad y elaboramos un mapeo científico.

Los hallazgos sugieren que el interés en esta área ha aumentado gradualmente. Los resultados también revelan el esfuerzo innovador de la industria en nuevas tecnologías para desarrollar modelos de marketing turístico. Se identificaron diez áreas de investigación (“marketing de destinos”, “patrones de movilidad”, “co-creación”, “gastronomía”, “sostenibilidad”, “comportamiento turístico”, “segmentación de mercado”, “redes neuronales artificiales”, “precios”, y “satisfacción del turista”).

Este trabajo es único al proponer una agenda para futuras investigaciones en investigación de Marketing Turístico con nuevas tecnologías como Big Data y técnicas de Inteligencia Artificial. Además, los resultados presentados aquí llenan el vacío actual en la investigación ya que si bien se han realizado revisiones de literatura que cubren Turismo con Big Data o Marketing, estas áreas no se han estudiado como un conjunto.

这一特定研究领域的目标是发现具有代表性的新兴领域, 并考察市场营销、旅游和大数据研究领域, 以评估这些主题领域在1996年至2022年的27年间是如何发展的。我们分析了1152项研究, 以确定主要专题领域和新兴主题、使用的主要理论、主要的分析形式以及在研究方面最有成效的作者。

本研究的文章都是从Web of Science数据库中选出的。我们进行了系统化的定量文献审查, 并使用SciMAT软件来提取指标。具体来说, 我们分析了生产力并制作了一个科学研究地图。

研究结果表明, 人们对这一领域的兴趣已经逐渐增加。本文也揭示了工业界在开发旅游营销模式的新技术方面的创新努力。研究确定了十个研究领域：“目的地营销”、“流动模式”、“共同创造”、“美食”、“可持续性”、“游客行为”、“市场细分”、“人工神经网络”、“定价 “和游客满意度”。

这项研究的独特之处在于提出了未来利用大数据和人工智能技术等新技术进行旅游营销研究的议程。此外, 本文的结果填补了目前的研究空白, 因为虽然有文献综述涉及旅游与大数据或市场营销, 但这些领域还没有被作为一个整体来研究。

• Tourism marketing
• Literature review
• Science mapping analysis
• Future research agenda
• Palabras Big data
• Marketing turístico
• Revisión de la literatura
• Análisis de mapeo científico
• Agenda de investigación futura

Blanco-Moreno, S. , González-Fernández, A.M. and Muñoz-Gallego, P.A. (2023), "Big data in tourism marketing: past research and future opportunities", Spanish Journal of Marketing - ESIC , Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/SJME-06-2022-0134

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Copyright © 2022, Sofía Blanco-Moreno, Ana M. González-Fernández and Pablo Antonio Muñoz-Gallego.

Published in Spanish Journal of Marketing – ESIC . 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 maybe seen at http://creativecommons.org/ licences/by/4.0/legalcode

1. Introduction

The field of tourism research is one of the most long-established areas, with more than 175,000 publications listed on the Web of Science (WoS) from 1940 until 2022 ( Kontogianni and Alepis, 2020 ).

Unfortunately, researchers have not always been in possession of sufficiently advanced tools and techniques to process all this information. However, thanks to big data (BD), grounded in facilities for the massive storage of quality structured data, this issue is starting to be resolved.

BD and its tools have changed the ways in which we can analyze and process information. However, there is currently no literature giving a thorough overview of how BD techniques have been used in tourism marketing over the past 27 years of its existence.

In the past decade, several authors have undertaken bibliometric analyses of tourism research literature. Work has concentrated on three key areas in isolation: tourism ( Hall, 2011 ; Köseoglu et al. , 2015 , 2016 ), BD in tourism ( Li et al. , 2018 ; Mariani and Baggio, 2021 ; Samara et al. , 2020 ) and tourism experience ( Kim and So, 2022 ). To our knowledge, no bibliometric analyses exist dealing with BD, tourism and marketing. Such a study has great value enabling researchers to gain an understanding of how key areas of study have evolved over time.

Compared to existing literature reviews on the topic “BD and tourism,” our work is distinctive in three ways. First, while the two previous literature reviews have focused only on BD and tourism, this study performs queries related explicitly to BD, tourism and marketing. We feel that the inclusion of marketing is essential as there is currently a lack of research into the practical applications of BD in tourism product design and marketing.

Second, while previous work has reviewed articles published between 2007 and 2020, we have extended the time span of interest to include all articles published, from 1996 to 2022. In this way, we cover not only the inception of this field but also its most recent evolution, including the two-year period of the COVID-19 crisis.

Third, unlike the present study, none of the previous review articles mentioned application of the bibliometric techniques of productivity analysis and science mapping.

The aim of this study then is to fill the gap identified in the current literature by completing possibly the first exhaustive bibliometric analysis of research output in the combined areas of BD, tourism and marketing.

The scientific database, the WoS, was selected for our analysis of trends and prediction of future research paths in this field. The analysis itself was completed through a complete indexation of articles found and the use of the bibliometric research tool SciMAT (Science Mapping Analysis Tool).

To uncover specific research niches representing emergent areas in the tourism marketing field.

To analyze the body of research in terms of principal authors, volume of publications and most productive categories.

To help academics and professionals gain a better understanding using a schema showing the evolution between 1996 and 2022.

To identify the key thematic areas that have drawn most research interest during the past 27 years.

We believe that one major contribution of this bibliometric analysis is the identification of 10 key themes in the past 27 years of BD research in tourism marketing. Furthermore, this study offers researchers useful information concerning the significance of BD in the development of tourism marketing strategies, both in the present and the future, and it highlights the emerging tendencies on which future investigation should be focused.

Our study begins with an overview of the evolution of BD in tourism marketing and goes on to explain our methods of bibliometric analysis, before giving a detailed explanation of the results of our empirical analysis and future research trends. We conclude with a description of the study’s limitations and its implications for the future.

2. The evolution of big data in tourism marketing

BD first emerged in 1989 with the birth of the World Wide Web. The term refers to the massive volumes of data produced online that are processed at high velocity, have a high level of veracity and comprise huge variety being both complex and diverse.

In the area of tourism, BD enables consumer profiling to create personalized services and make forecasts. Furthermore, recent research shows a clear tendency toward its use in the field of sustainable tourism; thus it has become an essential element in the United Nations plans to achieve its Sustainable Development Goals.

The use of BD in tourism marketing strategies can be explained through the classical resource-based view theory. This arises naturally from the fact that the use of BD requires physical resources such as sufficiently powerful computers; human resources, such as data scientists; and, because it is essential that organizations and corporate processes should be able to adapt to new technologies, intellectual resources like organizational capital.

The three major sources of BD for the tourism industry are as follows ( Li et al. , 2018 ): user data or user-generated content (UGC) like text and photos; device data, including that from the global positioning system (GPS) or Bluetooth; and transaction data such as Web searches and online bookings among others.

In the area of tourism marketing, research is dominated by studies that use online ratings and reviews to measure tourist satisfaction. Indeed, there are numerous studies concerning how hotels use electronic word of mouth (eWOM) due to the importance of this phenomenon in attracting tourists.

Furthermore, while the analysis of textual data is still important, photos are beginning to acquire prominence thanks to the development of web 2.0 and social networking platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, Flickr and Facebook. These data have a diversity of uses, for example, to analyze the attitudes of tourists toward a particular destination, as well as tourist behavior, given that a photo greatly simplifies the process by which travelers can communicate their tourist experiences online. In this way, industry specialists can make recommendations to potential clients, and design marketing strategies to promote particular services or tourist destinations.

3. Research design and data collection

To gain an understanding of the themes of BD, tourism and marketing, we performed a bibliometric analysis of academic articles indexed in one of the most important academic databases: WoS. Bibliometric analysis was used as it has several advantages and enables the evaluation of academic research according to objective criteria. It is used as a tool, and it facilitates the identification of new lines of research.

Because the aim of our bibliometric analysis was to evaluate key themes explored by researchers, and identify thematic clusters, it was vital to have a holistic overview of the BD, tourism and marketing themes. We selected WoS over other sources for three reasons.

First and foremost, even though WoS and Scopus are the two most commonly used sources for bibliometric analysis, the WoS database is the only large-scale literature database from as early as 1940 ( Calof et al. , 2022 ) and also contains articles from journals identified as having the highest impact factor according to the Journal Citation Report index. Second, WoS, compared to Scopus, has the advantage of having its own tourism category. Third, and finally, the WoS database is the most frequently used source of scientific information ( Kim and So, 2022 ).

Several search criteria were deployed to retrieve the articles. In line with Mariani and Baggio (2021) we developed multiple search queries entailing a combination of the focal keywords “big data,” “artificial intelligence,” “machine learning,” “marketing” and “consumer behavior,” with hospitality and tourism words “travel*,” “touris*” and “hotel” in the text, abstract and keywords.

As the data used for this study was collected between 1996 and 2022, the search was conducted from the beginning of the coverage up to March 31, 2022. We eliminated articles which were not directly related to the topic of the analysis. The final data set used for the analyses contains 1,152 papers for WoS.

To execute the bibliometric analysis, our sample of articles was grouped into four time periods, each addressing a particular era in the evolution of research into BD techniques, tourism and information technology ( Xiang, 2018 ).

The first time period (1996–2006) corresponds to a phase of explosion and digitalization of information. It is composed of 12 papers and 147 keywords. The second time period (2007–2016) corresponds to a phase of acceleration in the use, storage and processing of massive digital data. It is composed of 112 papers and 387 keywords. The third period (2017–2020) constitutes the most recent phase in which this type of data and its associated technologies are established, and the research field has matured. It is composed of 426 papers and 811 keywords. The last period (2020–2022) corresponds to the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is composed of 602 papers and 578 keywords.

The research methodologies used in this work are in line with the other well-known principles used in bibliometric analyses and quantitative literature reviews ( Cobo et al. , 2012 ; Tranfield et al. , 2003 ) ( Figure 1 ).

4. Method: bibliometric analysis using SciMAT

There are two principal methods of bibliometric analysis: productivity analysis , which evaluates the impact of academic research, and science mapping which enables the visualization of the structure and evolution of concepts within an academic field. This investigation combines both types of analysis to present the most important conceptual domains.

The first stage of our investigation involved a retrieval of publications related to BD, tourism and marketing on the WoS database.

Following this, the search was revised for possible errors, and the relevant documents were extracted to begin constructing our thematic network, in this instance using keywords ( Cobo et al. , 2012 ). We then constructed a word-network based on keyword co-occurrence, that is, when words appear together in a document this implies a relationship ( Cobo et al. , 2011a ).

The next step was relationship network normalization via the equivalence index, with the aim of calculating the degree of similarity between keywords. This is deemed to be the most appropriate way to normalize co-occurrence frequencies ( Cobo et al. , 2011b ).

After the normalization process, a science map was constructed to show the knowledge structure of this research area through its key concepts. The present study used an analysis of co-words in a longitudinal framework ( Cobo et al. , 2011a ). A clustering algorithm was applied to the networks of co-words generated for each of our selected time periods, to identify the most significant word in each cluster.

The visualization techniques available in SciMAT enable the representation of the science map with the evolution of thematic areas, through a diagram that allows the representation of two Callon’s centrality and Callon’s density ( Cobo et al. , 2011b ).

Callon’s centrality measures the degree of interaction between one network and other networks. It is defined as: c = 10 × ∑ e kh , where k refers to a keyword belonging to a theme in one network, and h refers to a keyword belonging to themes in other networks. Callon’s density measures the internal strength of the network and is defined as: d = 100 ( ∑ e ij / ω ), where i and j are keywords belonging to a given theme, and ω is the number of keywords in that theme. Two measures can represent the detected networks. On the strategic diagram, centrality and density are represented on the horizontal and vertical axes, respectively ( Figure 2 ). In this way, the diagram is divided into four categories:

Driving themes (upper right quadrant): those that are very interrelated, developed in great depth and highly relevant.

Underlying and transversal themes (lower right quadrant): important general themes in the research field but which are less well developed.

Emerging themes or those in decline (lower left quadrant): under-developed topics.

Specialized or peripheral themes (upper left quadrant): marginal themes having little relevance to the research field as a whole.

The last step is the productivity analysis which incorporates indicators such as the citation number, and the h and g indices. It enables an understanding of which topics are most productive and have the greatest impact.

5. Mapping the co-word analysis

5.1 productivity analysis and science mapping.

BD has made a significant impact in the field of tourism marketing research. Since 2017, the number of academic articles published in this area has seen a fivefold increase. More than 89% of the articles were published in the past six years.

Of the 446 journals included in the database, only 6% are directly related to tourism marketing, that is to say, 26 journals containing 71 articles.

The majority of the articles are not published in tourism marketing journals but are distributed across a variety of journals focusing on other disciplines such as management, sustainability and technology. The category of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism itself contains 476 articles and Tourism Management is the second most productive category, with 224 articles published in this area. Finally, the most productive authors are Rob Law (School of Hotel and Tourism Management, Hong Kong) and Zheng Xiang (Virginia Tech, Beijing Union University).

Certain themes have established their intrinsic importance throughout the 27 years studied here and we will discuss their development in what follows (see Table 1 ).

5.2 First period: digitalization of information (1996–2006)

Only 12 relevant articles appear in this 11-year period ( Figure 2a ).

5.2.1 Driving themes: “website,” “photographs,” “performance,” “online reviews” and “tourism patterns.”

The most highly related and most relevant driving themes are “website” and “online reviews” ( Cobo et al. , 2011a ).

The “website” cluster demonstrates the growing importance of three areas of research: traveler experiences recorded on blogs and Facebook; consumer perspectives on the personalization of products and services; and smart cities in Asia via the Internet of Things. The “online reviews” topic is connected with sentiment analysis for segmenting the international tourist market.

“Performance” and “tourism patterns” are concerned with forecasting in the tourism sector which studies segmentation strategies and the results in terms of performance ( Curry et al. , 2001 ) using social networks such as Sina Weibo.

The “photographs” topic is connected with analysis of smart tourism and ecotourism, and how to segment the market through self-organizing maps. Here, investigation predominantly focuses on the tourist motivations which have the greatest weight in buying decisions in the senior-tourist market segment ( Kim et al. , 2003 ).

5.2.2 Underlying and transversal themes: “behavior” and “big data.”

Tourist behavior is the most relevant of all the themes identified. Articles belonging to this cluster focus on environmental behavior, post-buying behavior, and forecasting tourist behavior. In addition, work in this area relies on two cognitive theories: the theory of reasoned action and its extension the theory of planned behavior. These theories are considered to offer the best framework for understanding tourist behavior ( Hsu and Huang, 2012 ).

The “behavior” theme is, in turn, related to others such as loyalty, market segmentation, mobility, demand and tourism forecasting. The majority of this research strand comes from the USA.

The application of human–computer interaction theory is another important topic here. This theory establishes the fundamentals for an understanding of tourists’ behavior in terms of how they search for and plan their trips ( Xiang, 2018 ).

To understand “consumer behavior,” researchers have used BD techniques such as time series ( Pattie and Snyder, 1996 ), and lexicon and text mining or modeling ( Bloom, 2004 ), and have predicted things like loyalty, sales and tourist satisfaction.

5.2.3 Emergent themes: “neural networks” and “tourism and hospitality.”

The theme “neural networks” is associated with predicting trends in “tourism demand” through the use of BD. Specifically, it links to how BD can improve models used in econometric forecasting ( Witt and Witt, 1995 ) through the use of artificial neural networks and so enable the development of improved tourism demand models ( Palmer et al. , 2006 ). Japan, China and Spain are connected to this theme. The most common types of analysis are cluster and multiple linear regression.

5.3 Second period: acceleration (2007–2016)

The total number of articles belonging to this period is 112, so is evidence of the huge growth index for publications in this field ( Figure 2b ). Topics such as “tourist satisfaction,” “big data,” “neural networks,” “China” and “social media” achieved 5,350 citations.

5.3.1 Principal driving theme: “tourist satisfaction”.

This is the most important driving theme in the field, leading in terms of number of documents, citations and values of h and g indices. It is strongly linked to WOM as recorded in reviews left by travelers describing their experiences in hotels, and the impact of these reviews on sales is also a topic of study.

This decade is characterized as an era of acceleration due to the enormous increase in UGC on the internet. This factor, among others, has enabled the in-depth study of eWOM ( Ghose et al. , 2012 ). UGC, comprising any online data either in the form of text or images, makes up almost 50% of BD in connection with tourism ( Li et al. , 2018 ). The reason for its extensive use lies in the fact that it can be easily accessed and processed, and indeed, it is very low cost ( Karimi et al. , 2020 ).

The predominant theoretical frameworks applied in this era include sign theory, attribution theory, transaction cost theory and expectancy theory. This demonstrates the impact of reviews in the description of consumer experience.

Online reviews are one of the significant elements in eWOM which can influence future demand from other clients, and as a result, has important commercial value ( Xie et al. , 2014 ). This is due to the way it can enable forecasting of future profits for hotels, decisions concerning the location of accommodation and room rates, as well as the improvement of results based on performance ( Pan and Yang, 2017 ).

A predominant trend here is articles addressing new ways of categorizing hotels based on the mean perceived utility of specific hotel features ( Berezina et al. , 2016 ). Other important work involves identification of which sorts of messages posted on social media enabled the greatest user interaction or the possibility of virality ( Mariani et al. , 2016 ). In this respect, Facebook and Twitter stand out.

5.3.2 Driving and transversal themes: “big data” and “neural networks.”

Alongside “tourist satisfaction,” these are the other driving themes in the second period. Both these concepts are cornerstones of marketing, due to their capacity to positively influence the performance of an organization. In this way, they are very interrelated terms and, in addition, are linked to the themes “perceived quality of service” and “loyalty,” which in turn are strongly connected to “tourist satisfaction.”

A large proportion of articles addresses the theme of “performance” and analyzes which variables affect tourism-business outcomes within a competitive environment. Among the areas that have received most attention in this regard are the quality of hotel services, and hotel attributes and efficiency, in addition to the identification of factors determining tourist satisfaction and appropriate strategic decision-making ( Moutinho et al. , 2015 ). The most common types of analysis are spatial ( Supak et al. , 2015 ), cluster ( Brida et al. , 2012 ), textual ( Krawczyk and Xiang, 2016 ), time series ( Claveria and Torra, 2014 ), fuzzy system ( Shahrabi et al. , 2013 ) and photo-sharing analysis ( García-Palomares et al. , 2015 ).

5.3.3 Secondary underlying and transversal themes: “administration and management,” “destination marketing” and “social media analyses.”

These three topics constitute the underlying transversal themes of research in this second period.

“Administration and management,” which began as a driving theme moves to being a transversal theme, that is, we see its consolidation. In the course of this theme’s evolution, BD research can be seen to undergo significant development, enabling it to encompass the problems of tourism management ( Xiang, 2018 ). In addition, this topic is aligned with the evolution in tourism demand. In this area, three big powers stand out: China, the USA and Europe, specifically Spain. In fact, “Europe” moves from being an emergent theme to become integrated into an essential cluster.

The topic of “destination marketing” is linked to the study of tourism destinations and traveler motivations. Of great importance here is the use of images and websites that guide traveler management ( Xiang, 2018 ). It is a fundamental theme from the resource-based theory, because online visibility is a differentiating factor leading to superior business performance because it potentially helps attract more tourists enabling increased rates of occupancy ( Smithson et al. , 2011 ).

Finally, the “analysis of social media” appears as an underlying theme. Understanding clients through the reviews left on social media platforms such as Twitter constitutes a key factor for success in the era of BD ( Park et al. , 2016 ). The principal techniques used in this field include neural networks and data mining.

5.3.4 Emergent areas: “pricing” and “geo-tagged data.”

These two themes are considered emergent areas. In contrast to the first period, these terms are now important, and they will have importance in the following (third) time period.

The “pricing” theme shows strong links to airlines through revenue management, pricing strategies and tourist satisfaction with low-cost or full-service carriers ( Leong et al. , 2015 ).

Through the use of geographic information systems, “geo-tagged data” has enabled the use of photos obtained principally from the Flickr social media platform ( Levin et al. , 2015 ).

5.4 Third period: consolidation (2017–2020)

Over these four years, the research field has grown with 426 articles ( Figure 2c ). Over this time period, tourism research undergoes a dramatic change as BD becomes a fundamental knowledge creation tool. This transformation is without precedent in academic research, and is thanks to ever more efficient management of the millions of bytes of data generated ( Batista e Silva et al. , 2018 ).

5.4.1 Principal driving theme: “tourist satisfaction.”

This is the highest central theme in the third period and is a topic that has gained importance with respect to the previous period. Tourism literature establishes general tourist satisfaction, and indeed tourists’ intention to return to a given destination is effected by many different destination attributes ( Alegre and Garau, 2010 ). For instance, consumers gain a specific degree of satisfaction as a function of their perceptions concerning the various attributes of hotels, thus perceptions represent one dimension of satisfaction ( Guo et al. , 2017 ).

This topic is strongly related to themes in the “tourist satisfaction” cluster from the second period, such as online and offline reviews, hotels and tourist intentions. Topics such as loyalty, and hotel attributes and service quality that were previously related to perceptions are now linked with satisfaction. Furthermore, terms such as “Twitter” and “UGC” have disappeared. Research is no longer so focused on general social networks, but rather on those that are specifically concerned with tourism such as TripAdvisor.

Data from reviews and blogs are now principally used in studies of satisfaction, recommendations and tourist opinion ( Deng and Li, 2018 ).

5.4.2 Secondary driving themes: “management,” “mobility,” “trust” and “destination marketing.”

Together with “tourist satisfaction,” these are among the driving themes of the third period. “Management” is a topic of relatively high importance in all the periods studied and, in the third period is once again a driving theme.

This cluster is related to other topics such as “social networks,” “Facebook” and “engagement.” The investigations in which these terms appear focus on the strategic use of Facebook to promote and market destinations ( Mariani et al. , 2018 ); on the analysis of opinions using texts ( Zola et al. , 2019 ); and the generation of commitment ( Villamediana-Pedrosa et al. , 2019 ).

The topic of “mobility” involves examples of the use of data obtained from GPS, social media and mobile telephones used between cities, and at open-air venues hosting sporting events or festivals ( Salas-Olmedo et al. , 2018 ). The theme of “trust,” on the other hand, exemplifies the growth of concerns and problems associated with engagement in the so-called trust economy ( Xiang, 2018 ), specifically Airbnb and Booking.com. Variables such as reputation, communication and pricing strategies are found to be moderating factors in the “trust” theme.

With respect to the “destination marketing” theme, here UGC predominates, as do marketing strategies on social networks and their analysis. In this way, organizations can understand the perceptions of users and develop strategies to promote revisiting.

In all, 73% of the articles look at tourist destination image. This theme has evolved from being dominated by the destination marketers, to become a dynamic process of interaction between tourists and promotion, before finally reaching a new era in which destination management organizations examine and modify their projected destination image based principally on behavior, perceptions, experiences and the diffusion of information by tourists on social networking platforms.

“Destination marketing” is related to heritage too, as well as rural tourism in protected areas and National Parks. Two basic objectives dominate: developing branding strategies and extracting trends in this area of tourism, with sustainability and ecological protection high on the agenda. The most common type of analysis is content analysis.

5.4.3 Underlying and transversal themes: “tourism destinations” and “photographs.”

Besides tourist satisfaction, these constitute the most important underlying and transversal themes in this period. Both are related to the analysis of geo-tagged text and images obtained from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor and Sina Weibo.

To improve their business intelligence, “tourist destinations” are supported by tools such as customer relationship management (CRM). The surge in social networks challenges traditional notions of how to manage client relationships, and thus social-CRM has appeared on the scene ( Chan et al. , 2018 ).

In terms of size, the “social networks” cluster clearly stands out. Current literature concerning CRM focuses on the analysis of BD and the use of social networking platforms to capture huge amounts of data and take advantage of customers’ improved interactivity to personalize services ( Sota et al. , 2020 ). TripAdvisor appears as the most widely used platform in terms of marketing strategies. Another area of high research activity is applied studies concerning China and sport tourism.

“Photographs” in conjunction with “tourism destinations” constitute the underlying and transversal themes of the third period of study.

This topic is highly related to the management and promotion of hotel rooms and online bookings, as well as attempts to better understand client profiling via BD ( Liu et al. , 2019 ). Furthermore, the availability of large sets of photos from trips shared online provides an accessible source of data for tourism researchers ( Ma et al. , 2020 ). This type of content can be interpreted through semiotic theory. The principal origin of online photographic content is social media such as Twitter, Instagram and Flickr, as well as blogs. These enable study of the discovery and development of tourist routes, marketing strategies and tourism patterns, and can be differentiated into two types: concerning travelers or trips. At present, tourism research related to photos is dominated by Flickr, despite the fact that Instagram has more users and contains more images.

5.4.4 Emergent themes: “market segmentation” and “internet.”

The “internet,” understood as the tool that provides the raw data on which the techniques of BD can operate, is starting to manifest as an emergent theme in the context of tourism marketing because it enables accommodation providers to adapt, for example, room characteristics and pricing strategies.

A further area of high interest is “market segmentation,” related to recommendation systems via the “internet” cluster. Both of these themes are themselves strongly linked to co-creation which enables, among other things, the personalization of products through market segmentation using traveler preference data and geo-localized data extracted from mobile phones. The use of BD techniques to segment the tourism market, in fact, continues to be recognized as a key source of value creation in the fourth time period.

5.5 Fourth period: COVID-19 (2020–2022)

To supplement this investigation in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, a further 602 articles published during the pandemic were added to our database. This additional, newly published work constitutes 50% of our database ( Figure 2d ).

5.5.1 Principal driving themes: “tourist satisfaction,” “social media,” “sharing economy,” “consumer” and “artificial intelligence.”

The theme “tourist satisfaction” continues to be the most important theme despite the COVID-19 pandemic. During these two last years studied, the number of studies dealing with BD see continued growth, particularly in reviews concerning the prediction of customer purchase preferences and its impact, and in looking at user experiences and perceptions through content analysis or making use of data gathered from platforms such as TripAdvisor. Specifically, areas being investigated include consumer behavior and social media marketing ( Nilashi et al. , 2021 ), and engagement with social exchange theory ( Song et al. , 2020 ).

The most extensively studied theme in this respect is sentiment analysis applied to text-based and photographic UGC shared on social media platforms, particularly Twitter. This analysis has allowed researchers to deepen and advance their understanding of destination marketing in the promotion of products and services.

The “sharing economy” is another theme that has gained importance in this last time period, with most research focusing on the social media site Airbnb ( Canziani and Nemati, 2021 ).

In addition, during this period, AI has become a consolidated topic with machine learning emerging as the most widely used technique to study the tourism ecosystem. Several Spanish authors specialize in the use of these techniques ( Marine-Roig and Huertas, 2020 ; Sánchez-Martín et al. , 2020 ; Valls and Roca, 2021 ) and they have been applied particularly successfully in the areas of tourism innovation and forecasting, decision-making and the analysis of performance and strategy.

5.5.2 Underlying and transversal themes: “hotel attributes” and “deep learning”.

These two themes are consolidated during the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic becoming transversal topics. In particular, “hotel attributes” have been studied in relation to competitiveness, rating and the effect they have on WOM. The forms of data gathering most widely used include text and data mining which enable the analysis of language and emotions through text. “Deep learning” is another important tool as it facilitates visual analysis, the prediction of occupancy and opinion classification ( Gómez et al. , 2021 ), all of which help tourism managers to develop and promote appropriate response strategies informed by service management theory ( Zhu et al. , 2021 ). In this area, China appears to be the most visible.

5.5.3 Emergent themes: “sustainability,” “tourist recommendation,” “social media analysis,” “values,” “prices” and “gastronomy.”

The bibliometric analysis undertaken has allowed us to identify the emergent themes that are likely to become increasingly important in the future.

Sustainability. The number of studies concerning profitability and perceptions in ecotourism is growing exponentially. The principal sources of data for this work are Google data and geo-tagged photographs. Analyzing trends in ecotourism is part of a strategic approach to assessing progress toward the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals ( Go et al. , 2020 ).

Tourist recommendation. An emergent theme in the third time period, market segmentation continues to be important in this time period, and as before, it is driven by tourist recommendation. Researchers continue to use BD to analyses tourist recommendations, and additionally we see this source of data being applied to new variables such as types of tourism, length of stay, attachment and quality of service ( Penagos-Londoño et al. , 2021 ).

Social media analysis. A particular use of this type of analysis is to look at revisit intentions in hospitality. This concept is integral to the relationship between marketing and customer loyalty, and has traditionally been investigated largely through customer surveys using closed-ended questions ( Liu and Beldona, 2021 ). Currently, there is an exponential growth in revisit intention analysis, particularly to look at decision making in hotel management, with researchers now turning to supervised machine learning rather than using social media analysis.

Values. Little is known about the influence of cultural factors in consumers’ evaluations of review helpfulness, and as a result, research into values, particularly using the theory of dominant logic, must be categorized as an emergent theme ( Filieri and Mariani, 2021 ).

Prices. Researchers are beginning to apply BD techniques to understanding how differences in market perception and information create a price differential ( Casamatta et al. , 2022 ). Until now, setting the price for new accommodation has been often based largely on location, number of beds and type of house, among other physical factors. However, the use of machine learning and intention analysis is beginning to take over as the means for price prediction in online booking systems ( Trang et al. , 2021 ).

Gastronomy. In the third time period studied, there were only three articles considering this topic and thus, it was considered isolated and highly specialized. In the fourth time period, however, we identified 14 articles concerning gastronomy, and thanks to this increased research interest, it must now be considered an emerging theme. Particular work worth highlighting includes a study using neural networks, an otherwise rarely used technique in the tourism sector, to construct gastronomic tourist profiles through behavioral analysis ( Moral-Cuadra et al. , 2021 ). In addition, new research is emerging concerning the design of gastronomic experiences based on consumer opinion, that is, involving co-creation ( Lin et al. , 2022 ). The exponential growth in co-creation strategies has already been pointed out by other authors.

5.6 Ten thematic areas across 27 years

Here, we give a structural analysis of the evolution of an academic field that has matured over the past 27 years. This analysis shows the development of 10 key areas (shaded with 10 different colors in Figure 3 ): “destination marketing,” “mobility patterns,” “co-creation,” “gastronomy,” “sustainability,” “tourist behavior,” “market segmentation,” “artificial neural networks,” “pricing” and “tourist satisfaction.” The literature demonstrates a solid cohesion because many of the same themes appear in all four of the different periods of development identified, showing the consolidation of these themes.

In the first period we examined, there are two thematic areas which might be described as classic: “mobility patterns” (81 papers and 988 citations) and “tourist behavior” (81 papers and 1,474 citations). In the second period , two further topics are added to the list: “tourist satisfaction” (541 papers and 4,379 citations) and “pricing” (181 papers and 1,195 citations). In the third period , two further topics are added to the list: “destination marketing” (220 papers and 1,450 citations) and “co-creation” (40 papers and 639 citations). These three periods represent the basis of BD tourism marketing research and show a highly developed line of investigation: the prediction of behavior patterns based on geo-tagged content enabling the improvement of strategies for destination marketing.

The fourth period of study , composed of articles published most recently (2020–2022) and thus affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, contains several emergent themes that may well gain importance in the future. These topics include, “gastronomy” (17 papers and 86 citations), “market segmentation” (75 papers and 1,577 citations), “sustainability” (55 papers and 768 citations) and “artificial neural networks” (158 papers and 2,447 citations). Artificial neural networks in particular have been in use from the beginnings of applied artificial intelligence (AI) in tourism marketing. However, it is only in recent years that their use has become widespread, and they should now be considered among the most important tools in tourism marketing ( Mariani and Baggio, 2021 ).

The two themes that stand out most in terms of impact indices are tourist satisfaction and destination marketing. These topics can, therefore, be considered as those of central importance are fundamental to the development of the whole field.

The “tourist satisfaction” theme shows a definitive upward trend with respect to relevant indices and citation numbers. This theme starts with a very small footprint which has grown and reflects the rapid development of this topic such that it is now considered as one of the leading areas of research. On the other hand, topics such as “astro-tourism” initially achieved high impact, but this has not grown over time. Other areas exist that have maintained their relevance throughout the 27 years studied, for example, “pricing” and still others, such as “co-creation” and “gastronomy” that have expanded, branching into new themes and gaining relevance in each subsequent time period.

The fourth period indicates the expanding use of BD in the field of tourism marketing and the increasing multidisciplinarity of the areas under investigation.

6. Discussion

There are several conclusions in the present study. Among the most important of these is revealing the direction of future research trends as well as identifying the structure of relationships between current and past themes in the research areas of BD, tourism and marketing.

This is the first study to apply a bibliometric approach to a clear gap in the research, in that it covers these three thematic areas simultaneously. In addition, it is unique in covering such a wide time period, from 1996 to 2022; thus, it includes the two years corresponding to the COVID-19 pandemic. This two-year period is significant as it was particularly productive and saw the emergence of several new themes.

In this way, we have been able to identify tools, types of BD techniques, authors and most importantly, conceptual themes that have played the most vital roles in this research field throughout the 27 years studied. Thus, as explained previously, this work constitutes a significant contribution to the field by uniquely covering BD, tourism and marketing.

We developed a schematic diagram to show the evolution of principal research themes from 1996 to 2022, divided into four individual time periods. To this end, we used the SciMAT to make an initial, exhaustive bibliometric search of the literature with 1,152 articles published on WoS. This constitutes the entire academic output in this field to date and publications can be divided into four categories corresponding to different periods: digitalization of information (1996–2006); acceleration (2007–2016); consolidation (2017–2020); and COVID-19 (2020–2022).

To aid analysis, the body of research considered in this study was separated into ten major thematic areas: “destination marketing,” “mobility patterns,” “co-creation,” “gastronomy,” “sustainability,” “tourist behavior,” “market segmentation,” “artificial neural networks,” “pricing” and “tourist satisfaction.”

A particularly important area was “tourist satisfaction,” which shows an upward trend through the full 27-year span of this study, reaching what might be called its golden era in the third time period considered. Tourism research defines the general concept of tourist satisfaction and also identifies several dimensions, among which one of the most important is visitor perceptions of hotel attributes. The analysis of tourist satisfaction has been assisted primarily by marketing platforms on social media networks. In recent times, certain networks, such as Twitter, have declined in importance, giving way to other UGC platforms like TripAdvisor which allows access to tourists’ opinions through the reviews they leave.

The most important aspect of this work has been the identification of future lines of investigation and where there is a need to deepen our understanding in certain fields.

7. Implications

This investigation highlights the relevance of BD in tourism marketing research, demonstrates its importance to business and offers relevant and empirical information to tourism-related organizations and private businesses.

In the first place, this review suggests that researchers are interested in BD, tourism and marketing in many different disciplines. In fact, our analysis shows that many of the academics contributing to the field of BD and tourism do not publish in marketing journals. Thus, we would suggest that more interdisciplinary collaboration would help advance the field and, perhaps, this observation constitutes one of the principal contributions of this work. Through this analysis, we hope to provide information concerning new opportunities for research and help to strengthen lines of investigation that may be of potential interest both for academics and practitioners in this field. This is especially important for establishing possible collaborations between these two groups.

In the second place, marketing professionals should invest in more research into the problems they wish to solve using BD and AI since, as we have seen, their current uses are many and varied: predicting tourism demand, analyzing tourist satisfaction, or market segmentation. On the basis of such research, businesses could obtain a variety of appropriate data for every type of analysis or purpose proposed.

In the third place, while the tourism industry is making effective investment in the management of BD and its analysis of AI, this bibliometric analysis demonstrates that the contribution of academic research is also significant. Thus, collaboration between industry and academia would further invigorate this area of research and facilitate its advance.

Finally, given that the rate of evolution in marketing strategies based on new technologies is extremely fast moving, leading hotel and tourism businesses, and indeed, marketing consultants, must make use of AI to improve, innovate and extract the maximum value from data. Furthermore, this may be even more important in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as this work demonstrates that the correct management of data is increasingly invaluable to the industry being able to respond and adapt to external shocks. This information can then be used to plan more efficient business strategies focused on specific types of clients.

8. Limitations and future research

It is necessary to address the limitations of this study. The use of other databases such as Scopus or Google scholar might have provided additional results. Thus, WoS was considered adequate for our purposes.

Despite this limitation, we feel this investigation is of undoubted interest. It provides a novel, possibly the only, presentation of the major trends in this area of research and as a result provides a point of departure for academics and practitioners to discover new avenues of investigation, as well as strengthening already established lines of research, for example, the “sustainability” theme in which it recommends considering the profitability of hotel businesses and tourist perceptions; or “gastronomy,” where there is a large gap in the literature concerning the gastronomical profiling of tourists, and this could be solved by the use of techniques such as neural networks. Other emergent themes are “social media analysis” to study tourist decision-making, “values” and “prices.”

Analytical process implemented

Strategic diagrams between 1996 and 2022 (cites and papers ): (a) 1996–2006; (b) 2007–2016; (c) 2017–2020 (March); (d) 2020 (April)–2022 (April)

Thematic map of big data tourism marketing literature (1996–2022)

Summary of the most important aspects of the four periods

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo (Spain), AEI-010500–2020-253 (DTI^A Project: 4.0 technological tools for measurement, evaluation and monitoring of the Friendliness concept linked to the Smart Tourist Destinations)

Declaration of interest: None

Corresponding author

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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.

About ResearchProspect Ltd

ResearchProspect is a UK-based academic writing service that provides help with Dissertation Proposal Writing, PhD Proposal Writing, Dissertation Writing, Dissertation Editing, and Improvement.

For further assistance with your dissertation, take a look at our full dissertation writing service .

Our team of writers is highly qualified and is an expert in their respective fields. They have been working for us for a long time. Thus, they are well aware of the issues as well as the trends of the subject they specialise in. 

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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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Bali Tourism Research Trends: A Systematic Review, 1976–2022

2022, Jurnal Kajian Bali (Journal of Bali Studies)

This research aims to systematically review of literature on Bali tourism from 1976 to 2022. This study employed a descriptive quantitative approach and utilizes 128 publications with the keyword "tourism in Bali" sourced from the Scopus database. This study concludes that the development of Bali tourism research has increased significantly. The contribution of Indonesian authors continues to dominate Bali tourism research. International authors play an essential role, especially in introducing the study of Bali tourism in the early thirty years. Furthermore, this review was successful in identifying the most commonly used topics, research approaches, and paradigms by researchers. This research, in particular, divides the evolution of the topics into four phases. The study's sample of articles is restricted to those from the single database Scopus and solely in English. As a result, future research should be able to analyze articles from other sources, and in a broader range of languages.

Related Papers

Regional Science Inquiry

Setiawan Priatmoko , Edith Pallás

The Indonesian government is currently boosting its tourism by using the success of the island of Bali as a model, the project is called Ten New Balis. This article examines previous studies and statistical data to presents a deep analysis of macro-environmental factors of tourism in Indonesia related to Bali as a development model. The study is based on Scopus articles associated with Indonesia and Bali tourism development articles and statistical data collected from the statistics bureau's Indonesian office, BPS-Statistics. The thematic framework analysis and descriptive analysis describe complementary insight of tourism planning and development issues. Proposed future tourism development planning could be seen clearer by using mixed-method analysis. Extending different research articles databases will give a good result comparison.

IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science

Helmut Bott

Nafisah Wulandari

Thomas Wright

Analytic article on tourism and water consumption in Bali. Published in The Conversation Original article: https://theconversation.com/beneath-the-surface-of-tourism-in-bali-64673

IJSES Editor

The purpose of this research is to explain and describe how Bali tourist heritage improve its competitiveness so that it can align with other international destinations and how to maintain the achievement of Bali as a leading destination in Indonesia. This research uses qualitative approach of penomenology that is by way of in-depth interviews to informants who are considered understand about the phenomenon of tourism in Bali. Interviewing is possible to be directed to government, academic, tourism and spiritual practitioners in Bali. The results showed that to accelerate and enhance the competitiveness of Bali tourism required the development of environment, culture, economy, which is based on a strong religion.

E-Journal of Tourism

I Putu Astawa

Bali tourism has been suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, efforts to revive tourism and restore the economy in Bali are needed. The main objectives of this study are (1) to analyze the efforts to build the trust of the tourists to visit Bali, (2) to analyze the policies to encourage tourists to come to Bali. This study utilized a qualitative approach. The study was conducted in Bali, and data was collected through interview, observation, and documentation techniques. The key informants in this study were the Heads of the following institutions: Bali Provincial Tourism Office, Statistics of Bali Province, Bali Provincial Health Office, and Bank Indonesia. The result of this study revealed that building trust from the tourists to visit Bali can be done by suppressing and reducing the spread of COVID-19, repetition of public awareness socialization campaigns about health protocols implementation, providing healthcare facilities, medical personnel, and paramedics, tight t...

Steve Quinn

Tourism has a large economic impact on Bali. Consequently, a segment of the population must satisfy and host 1 million tourists annually; mostly from Australia, Japan, Western Europe, and Indonesia. Also, year by year, this influx of tourist dollars has corollaries that physically and socially transform Bali. For example, foreigners require accommodations commensurate with their comfort level. In other words, artificial environments are created tailored for tourists. Hence, hotels are constructed and these are staffed by the locals and Javanese immigrants. Former agriculture and pasture areas are purchased and changed into development sites and western style recreation areas such as golf courses.. These changes in turn cause people to leave their villages and the fields to learn the people and work skills needed to be employed in the tourist industry. Additionally, experiencing Balinese culture is the major attraction that draws people from other countries and from inside Indonesia. The outcome is additional theater, and increased art and carved artifacts. This subsequently necessitates more performers in music and dance, as well as more artists and painters. Hence, these conditions result in fewer rice farmers. Moreover, for the 1 million or so tourists, an additional layer of connections are added with transport vehicles, fuel, auto repairmen, pollution, and maintaining road networks. Similarly, daily showers, toilet flushing, drinking water, and so on affect the water supply. Ceremonies and rituals themselves are also affected by tourism. Dances are developed and performed specifically to satisfy tourists.

I Putu Eka N. Kencana

woko suparwoko

This considers issues pertaining to tourism development in Indonesia and will examine several aspects of tourism growth, regional tourism backgrounds, and tourism development, and the impact of the transitional period of regional autonomy in Indonesia (1999 - present). At a national level, tourism growth is analysed in relation to such aspects as domestic-foreign visitors, tourist destinations, and the significance of tourism to the regional economy in Indonesia. Discussion of regional tourist development follows. Other issues examined include: investment relating to regional economics; tourism stakeholders and destinations, regional investment and tourism impacts, and the military and Indonesian Chinese involvement in the tourism industry. Finally, project developments will be considered from a regional autonomy perspective to distinguish the key stakeholders of tourism project developments, particularly in the three regional tourism centres of Yogyakarta, Bali, and Batam.

Jagat Prirayani

As one of the main travel destinations in the world, an effort to achieve Bali as the most interesting, comfortable and highly competitive place for foreign tourists needs to be sustainably enhanced. This effort would require the allocation of economic resources and clear government strategies to achieve the optimal allocation. This research investigated the key indicators of Bali tourism service from two parties, namely the foreign tourists as consumer and the local government as policy maker for tourism services in Bali. The indicators that used in this research were entry, long distance transportation, short distance transportation, hospitality, tourist attraction, promotion and supporting infrastructure. The identification of key indicators was conducted through a tourism survey based on two criteria, namely expected and perceived value, on 235 foreign tourists who stayed in the two most populated regencies, Kuta and Ubud. In addition, the identification of key indicators of policy maker was conducted through interview with Department of Culture and Tourism. The techniques for analyzing the data were Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The findings from this investigation yielded key indicators performance that would be useful for local government to improve tourism performance in Bali. It was also found that the cleanliness of hotel environment, the cleanliness of tourist attractions, the fame of tourist attraction, the availability of short distance transportation, the price of transportation, the flight availability, the highway infrastructure, the electricity supply, the ease of visa and custom process and the international promotion as the essential key indicators that the local government must pay attention to.

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Simple and fast NodeJS internal caching.

A simple caching module that has set , get and delete methods and works a little bit like memcached. Keys can have a timeout ( ttl ) after which they expire and are deleted from the cache. All keys are stored in a single object so the practical limit is at around 1m keys.

BREAKING MAJOR RELEASE v5.x

The recent 5.x release:

• dropped support for node versions before 8.x!
• removed the callback-based api from all methods (you can re-enable them with the option enableLegacyCallbacks )

BREAKING MAJOR RELEASE v6.x UPCOMING

Although not breaking per definition, our typescript rewrite will change internal functions and their names. Please get in contact with us, if you are using some parts of node-cache's internal api so we can work something out!

Or just require the node_cache.js file to get the superclass

Initialize (INIT):

• stdTTL : (default: 0 ) the standard ttl as number in seconds for every generated cache element. 0 = unlimited
• checkperiod : (default: 600 ) The period in seconds, as a number, used for the automatic delete check interval. 0 = no periodic check.
• true is recommended if you want simplicity , because it'll behave like a server-based cache (it caches copies of plain data).
• false is recommended if you want to achieve performance or save mutable objects or other complex types with mutability involved and wanted, because it'll only store references of your data.
• Here's a simple code example showing the different behavior
• deleteOnExpire : (default: true ) whether variables will be deleted automatically when they expire. If true the variable will be deleted. If false the variable will remain. You are encouraged to handle the variable upon the event expired by yourself.
• enableLegacyCallbacks : (default: false ) re-enables the usage of callbacks instead of sync functions. Adds an additional cb argument to each function which resolves to (err, result) . will be removed in node-cache v6.x.
• maxKeys : (default: -1 ) specifies a maximum amount of keys that can be stored in the cache. If a new item is set and the cache is full, an error is thrown and the key will not be saved in the cache. -1 disables the key limit.

Since 4.1.0 : Key-validation : The keys can be given as either string or number , but are casted to a string internally anyway. All other types will throw an error.

Store a key (SET):

myCache.set( key, val, [ ttl ] )

Sets a key value pair. It is possible to define a ttl (in seconds). Returns true on success.

Note: If the key expires based on it's ttl it will be deleted entirely from the internal data object.

Store multiple keys (MSET):

myCache.mset(Array<{key, val, ttl?}>)

Sets multiple key val pairs. It is possible to define a ttl (seconds). Returns true on success.

Retrieve a key (GET):

myCache.get( key )

Gets a saved value from the cache. Returns a undefined if not found or expired. If the value was found it returns the value .

Since 2.0.0 :

The return format changed to a simple value and a ENOTFOUND error if not found *( as result instance of Error )

Since 2.1.0 :

The return format changed to a simple value, but a due to discussion in #11 a miss shouldn't return an error. So after 2.1.0 a miss returns undefined .

Take a key (TAKE):

myCache.take( key )

get the cached value and remove the key from the cache. Equivalent to calling get(key) + del(key) . Useful for implementing single use mechanism such as OTP, where once a value is read it will become obsolete.

Get multiple keys (MGET):

myCache.mget( [ key1, key2, ..., keyn ] )

Gets multiple saved values from the cache. Returns an empty object {} if not found or expired. If the value was found it returns an object with the key value pair.

The method for mget changed from .get( [ "a", "b" ] ) to .mget( [ "a", "b" ] )

Delete a key (DEL):

myCache.del( key )

Delete a key. Returns the number of deleted entries. A delete will never fail.

Delete multiple keys (MDEL):

myCache.del( [ key1, key2, ..., keyn ] )

Delete multiple keys. Returns the number of deleted entries. A delete will never fail.

Change TTL (TTL):

myCache.ttl( key, ttl )

Redefine the ttl of a key. Returns true if the key has been found and changed. Otherwise returns false. If the ttl-argument isn't passed the default-TTL will be used.

The key will be deleted when passing in a ttl < 0 .

Get TTL (getTTL):

myCache.getTtl( key )

Receive the ttl of a key. You will get:

• undefined if the key does not exist
• 0 if this key has no ttl
• a timestamp in ms representing the time at which the key will expire

List keys (KEYS)

myCache.keys()

Returns an array of all existing keys.

Has key (HAS)

myCache.has( key )

Returns boolean indicating if the key is cached.

Statistics (STATS):

myCache.getStats()

Returns the statistics.

Flush all data (FLUSH):

myCache.flushAll()

Flush all data.

Flush the stats (FLUSH STATS):

myCache.flushStats()

Flush the stats.

Close the cache:

myCache.close()

This will clear the interval timeout which is set on check period option.

Fired when a key has been added or changed. You will get the key and the value as callback argument.

Fired when a key has been removed manually or due to expiry. You will get the key and the deleted value as callback arguments.

Fired when a key expires. You will get the key and value as callback argument.

Fired when the cache has been flushed.

flush_stats

Fired when the cache stats has been flushed.

Breaking changes

Version 2.x.

Due to the Issue #11 the return format of the .get() method has been changed!

Instead of returning an object with the key { "myKey": "myValue" } it returns the value itself "myValue" .

version 3.x

Due to the Issue #30 and Issue #27 variables will now be cloned. This could break your code, because for some variable types ( e.g. Promise ) its not possible to clone them. You can disable the cloning by setting the option useClones: false . In this case it's compatible with version 2.x .

version 5.x

Callbacks are deprecated in this version. They are still useable when enabling the enableLegacyCallbacks option when initializing the cache. Callbacks will be completely removed in 6.x .

Compatibility

Node-Cache supports all node versions >= 8

Release History

Other projects

The mit license (mit).

Copyright © 2019 Mathias Peter and the node-cache maintainers, https://github.com/node-cache/node-cache

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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npm i node-cache

Git github.com/node-cache/node-cache

github.com/node-cache/node-cache

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