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This viewpoint is a response to Yeoman's (2022) editorial on Sunderland AFC and the future of tourism. This viewpoint aims to outline the lessons one can learn from Star Wars about the future of tourism.

The paper reviews the live-action movies and series of the Star Wars franchise.

The paper derives specific conclusions in the following directions: the future technology in travel, tourism and hospitality; the tourists' motivation and behaviour; the management of travel, tourism and hospitality companies; destination management; economy and society and lessons from the franchise.

This is one of the first papers to elaborate on the lessons one can learn about the future of tourism from the Star Wars live-action movies and series.

This paper aims to present the findings from a European study on the digital skills gaps in tourism and hospitality companies.

Mixed methods research was adopted. The sample includes 1,668 respondents (1,404 survey respondents and 264 interviewees) in 5 tourism sectors (accommodation establishments, tour operators and travel agents, food and beverage, visitor attractions and destination management organisations) in 8 European countries (UK, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands and Bulgaria).

The most important future digital skills include online marketing and communication skills, social media skills, MS Office skills, operating systems use skills and skills to monitor online reviews. The largest gaps between the current and the future skill levels were identified for artificial intelligence and robotics skills and augmented reality and virtual reality skills, but these skills, together with computer programming skills, were considered also as the least important digital skills. Three clusters were identified on the basis of their reported gaps between the current level and the future needs of digital skills. The country of registration, sector and size shape respondents’ answers regarding the current and future skills levels and the skills gap between them.

The paper discusses the digital skills gap of tourism and hospitality employees and identifies the most important digital skills they would need in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how demographic changes in developed countries will continue to drive the tourism and hospitality industries to adopt automation in business operations.

The approach is an analysis of the trends in human reproduction in the developed countries and a discussion of their implications for the travel, tourism and hospitality industries.

There are three major solutions to the demographic problem faced in developed countries and the replacement of human labour with automation is the most practical, immediate and has the fewest risks and negative externalities.

Industry has to adapt to the new demographic reality and embrace automation of services, educate their customers and have policies to deal with the resistance expected by labour.

Society can expect that many of the tasks they commonly expect humans to be involved in will be done by machines and artificial intelligence in the near future, if demographic trends continue and massive immigration into developed countries is not a continuing phenomenon.

This links the relationship between demographic trends to the use of automation in the travel, tourism and hospitality industries.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the robotic restaurant experience of travellers around the world and understand the components of robotic restaurant experience.

Travellers who had experienced a robotic restaurant were purposefully selected as a sample group for the study. As the robotic restaurants are limited around the world, multiple case study method has been chosen to gather richer data. A user-generated content technique which is a form of qualitative case study method has been benefited to gather data from travellers’ reviews.

The results reveal a model of components of robotic restaurant experience that include six main themes: attraction for kids, robotic system, memorable experience, ambience related attributes, food related attributes (economic value and gastronomic aspects) and deficiencies (in robotic system, in ambience related attributes and in food related attributes).

This paper is one of the first to investigate the robotic restaurant experience of travellers around the world. Moreover, it contributes to the research on restaurant experience and offers a model of components of the robotic restaurant experience.

The hospitality industry in developed countries is under pressure due to labor shortages and it is likely more food and beverage operations will have to be automated in the future. This research investigates the public’s perceptions of the use of robots in food and beverage operations to learn about how the public perceives automation in food and beverage.

Data were collected from a survey disseminated online in 12 languages, resulting in a sample of 1,579 respondents. The data were analyzed using factor analysis and OLS regressions.

The data also reveal that generally positive attitudes toward the use of robots in tourism and hospitality is a strong indicator of positive attitudes toward the use of robots in an F&B setting. The data also illustrate that the public’s perception of appropriateness of the use of robots in F&B operations is positively related to robots’ perceived reliability, functionality and advantages compared to human employees.

The implications illustrate that the public seems to be generally accepting robots in food and beverage operations, even considering the public’s understanding and acceptance of the limitations of such technologies.

The research suggests that a critical element in terms of incorporating automation into future food and beverage operations is encouraging consumers to have generally positive attitudes toward the use of robots in hospitality and tourism industries.

This survey is based upon the data gathered in multiple countries to learn about how individuals perceive the use of robots in food and beverage operations, illustrating the attitudes that will assist or hinder the automation of this service industry.

The paper aims to evaluate the ways ChatGPT is going to disrupt tourism education and research.

This is a conceptual paper.

ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize tourism education and research because it can do what students and researchers should do, namely, generate text (assignments and research papers). Universities will need to reevaluate their teaching and assessment strategies and incorporate generative language models in teaching. Publishers will need to be more receptive toward manuscripts that are partially generated by artificial intelligence. In the future, digital teachers and research assistants will take over many of the cognitive tasks of tourism educators and researchers.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this is one of the first academic papers that investigates the implications of ChatGPT to tourism education and research.

This conceptual study examines the implications of the Internet of Behaviors (IoB) for tourism stakeholders in a hyper-connected and data-driven world.

Based on nudge theory, a literature review and empirical evidence from multidisciplinary research, this study explores the implications of the IoB for smart tourism.

This study reviews the literature, presents a conceptual framework and proposes a research agenda with areas for future research.

The research on the IoB is nascent. Therefore, it is critical to understand how data-driven nudging influences tourist behavior.