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Purpose: The information-intensive nature of the tourism and hospitality industry requires regular communication between firms and customers. Yet, customer service personnel’s high contact levels with customers often lead to customer dissatisfaction arising from embarrassment in emotion-inducing service encounters. Accordingly, such companies have been seeking a cost-effective means of maintaining consistency in customer contact. Thus, it seems that the future of chatbots is here.

Design/methodology/approach: This chapter examines chatbots in two ways: the technical composition and its adoption by tourism firms. The technical perspective is represented by a diagram which espouses the functioning of chatbots from inputs query to output reply. On its adoption by tourism firms, two main organizational theories were proposed.

Findings: While chatbots are diffusing rapidly in other areas, their use in the tourism and hospitality industry remains low. We have examined the role of chatbots in various areas of the tourism and hospitality industry and highlighted the barriers to their successful adoption. By applying a conceptual and theoretical approach, our study used a hybrid of institutional theory and organizational learning theory and diagrammatically espouses how the integration of these theories can aid subsequent studies to understand the environmental and organization-specific factors influencing chatbots adoption.

Research limitations/implications: This study is conceptual, consequently, we recommend future studies to empirical test and validate our proposed conceptual framework.

Originality/value: This study is one of the earliest studies that advances firm-level adoption of chatbots by integrating two key organizational theories.

The chapter discusses online branding in the business-to-business domain and the benefits it offers to B2B actors. Online branding is a tool to interact and communicate with existing and potential customers. The authors also present content marketing as a marketing effort available to B2B marketers, as well as the nature of digital relationships in social media. The reader learns the importance of branding the company through digital channels and those benefits that can be reached through such actions. The digital tools presented in the chapter relate to social media, for example, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs, search engine optimization, and paid advertising. These tools are discussed in detail, both related to their benefits and pitfalls.