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An AI concierge is a technologically advanced, intelligent and personalized assistant that is designated to an individual customer, proactively taking care of that customer’s needs throughout the service journey. This article envisions the idea of AI concierges and discusses how to leverage AI concierges in the customer journey.

This article takes a conceptual approach and draws insights from literature in service management, marketing, psychology, human-computer interaction and ethics.

This article delineates the fundamental forms of AI concierges: dialog interface (no embodiment), virtual avatar (embodiment in the virtual world), holographic projection (projection in the physical world) and tangible service robot (embodiment in the physical world). Key attributes of AI concierges are the ability to exhibit semantic understanding of auditory and visual inputs, maintain an emotional connection with the customer, demonstrate proactivity in refining the customer’s experience and ensure omnipresence through continuous availability in various forms to attend to service throughout the customer journey. Furthermore, the article explores the multifaceted roles that AI concierges can play across the pre-encounter, encounter and post-encounter stages of the customer journey and explores the opportunities and challenges associated with AI concierges.

This paper provides insights for professionals in hospitality, retail, travel, and healthcare on leveraging AI concierges to enhance the customer experience. By broadening AI concierge services, organizations can deliver personalized assistance and refined services across the entire customer journey.

This article is the first to introduce the concept of the AI concierge. It offers a novel perspective by defining AI concierges’ fundamental forms, key attributes and exploring their diverse roles in the customer journey. Additionally, it lays out a research agenda aimed at further advancing this domain.

The research aims to identify the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site (WHS) managers' perception of cultural sustainability concepts and elements in tourism.

A literature review was carried out to identify the main speeches and characteristic elements of cultural sustainability present in the academic field, and then a quantitative survey was carried out with 60 managers of UNESCO WHSs to evaluate their perception of the theme.

The results show that managers believe that the concept of cultural sustainability is much more closely linked to the social dimension of sustainability than to the economic and environmental dimensions. Thus, elements such as the preservation of tangible and intangible assets, the participation of society in the management of heritage, the democratization of access, the guarantee of the appreciation of culture and its preservation for future generations are basic elements for cultural sustainability. Finally, although they believe that understanding the concept of cultural sustainability is fundamental to their activities, they still lack knowledge of how to measure cultural sustainability in their spaces.

Although the theme of sustainability has several published studies, most of the work focuses only on studies of its social, economic and environmental dimensions. The debates on the role of culture in sustainability are still incipient, and understanding the managers' perception of the topic enables the creation of more effective strategies that guarantee cultural sustainability in heritage by tourism.

This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of sustainable tourism research published in Scopus-indexed journals covering the period from 1997 to 2021. Articles published during these 25 years were subjected to science mapping and performance analysis to propose potential areas for future research.

A bibliometric analysis using performance analysis and science mapping was conducted on 1,754 research papers retrieved from the Scopus database using the keyword “sustainable tourism.” Biblioshiny and VOSviewer are commonly used bibliometric tools. Science mapping techniques use coauthorship, keyword co-occurrence and co-citation analyses.

This study revealed the sustainable tourism publications’ spatial and temporal patterns, indicating a yearly growth rate of 19.9% during a 25-year period. The study identified Stefan Gossling as the most influential author, the “Journal of Sustainable Tourism” as the leading journal and Australia as the most productive country in sustainable tourism literature. The study used co-citation analysis to identify five thematic clusters, namely, reconceptualization and criticism, the role of residents, eco-labeling and the role of stakeholders, community-based tourism and the shift toward establishing sustainability indicators and effective governance and policymaking. The coauthorship analysis identifies the most influential author in collaborative efforts, and the most common pattern of collaboration is between researchers from different institutions in the same country, such as China and the Philippines, followed by collaborations between authors from other countries. The keyword co-occurrence analysis uncovered keywords that aligned with theme clusters generated from the co-citation analysis.

This study comprehensively uncovers five thematic clusters that have never been extracted so far in the literature. Also, it attempts to fill the gaps related to sustainable tourism by suggesting directions for future research.