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There has been a massive, revolutionary change over the past two decades in the travel and tourism industry. Mobile technology offers privileges to consumers in order to identify, customize and purchase tourism products and support the globalization of the industry by providing tools for developing, managing and distributing beneficiaries worldwide. These diligent advancements in mobile technology have made it extremely easy for everyone to know instantly as much about the world as they want. The use of smartphones, tablets and mobile devices has empowered global tourists with more flexibility, options and freedom to explore places than ever before. For that reason, mobile technology is a perfect fit for travel and tourism that plays an important role in massive cultural shift of consumer behaviour. All over the world, businesses are struggling to adapt to that incredible spread and impact of mobile technology and in the future, the technology will go on developing and adapting, as well. As mobile technology has been evolving rapidly and spreading across multiple tourism sectors, it is pivotal to take into account its role in creating innovative experiences for consumers and fostering a sustainable competitive advantage for suppliers in the tourism industry. Though mobile evolution has contributed to enhancing the travel factor at large, not much is known about how it has affected the tourism development. Finding this information is crucial for a deeper understanding of how consumers are using tourism-related mobile technology before, during and after their trip. It could provide meaningful perceptions to meet their expectations and to enhance their travel experiences. Therefore, this chapter aims to identify the potential of mobile technology in several businesses in the tourism sector providing guidance to understanding its role to enhance value creation in the future.

Geotechnologies have a long tradition in several areas of society and research. The recent development of the ‘Internet of Everything’ (IoE) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies opened several doors to the contribution of tourism. Emergent technologies contributions to tourism and planning such as web mapping, augmented reality (AR), crowdsourcing and crowdsensing are relatively recent, and there is a lack of research around their potential for Creative Tourism enhancement. For example, combining web mapping with AR or storytelling can be an excellent contribution to operators, planners and tourists. For research purposes, new opportunities are open, particularly by integrating community-shared data. It is well known for the popularity of social networks, the exponential growth of photo sharing, but few studies have been implemented to understand their contribution to research. This chapter focuses on emerging geotechnologies concerning cultural mapping, Creative Tourism and sustainability. Since it is a new growing niche, more research is needed to develop and understand the potential of new approaches. Besides traditional techniques such as quantitative (e.g. surveys) and qualitative ones (e.g. interviews, focus groups and world café), it revises the role of geotechnologies on Creative Tourism development and growing activities. Results from case studies from Europe are analysed.

Tourism industry has extensively embraced technologies to enhance operational competencies, service quality over and above customer satisfaction. This chapter presents Information Technologies as an innovative approach to promote tourism destination from Destination Management Organization’s (DMO’s) perspective. Precisely, attention has been given on how destination managers are applying different types of technological tools to promote their tourism business. In recent times, DMOs are implementing several promotional tools with the use of technology like embracing the mobile technology, Social Media, online ads, and building effective marketing strategies innovatively to compete with the cut-throat competition in travel trade. It also tried to provide an insight understanding of the changes in destination manager’s promotional strategies with the advancement of technologies. Based on primary research with destination managers and using the literature review, a collection of technology-based tools used by DMOs for the promotion of tourism at the destination level was identified and their individual impacts were measured to identify the effects on the profit generation. To accomplish the mentioned objectives, an explorative study based on basic demographic analysis along with Pearson correlation and Simple Linear Regression was conducted to examine the individual impacts of the different promotional tools used by DMOs.

Application of technology and meeting accessibility requirements of guests are two essential areas to consider and improve in order to facilitate, ameliorate and accelerate the management of hospitality services furnished by hotels. These two trends carry great importance for competitivity of hotels' services and sustainability of tourism industry. They are two distinguishing characteristics that build a positive perception of hotels' image among its rivals.

This chapter aims to reflect the current level of conformance of the hotels' services to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for tourism, specifically, SDG 11 related to accessibility and SDGs 9, 12 and 13 related to technology. A qualitative research is conducted to find out the commitment and awareness levels of the hotel staff at managerial positions to the accessibility and technology requirements in line with the mentioned SDGs. The representatives of city centre hotels of İzmir, Turkey with three, four and five stars and boutique hotels categories are chosen as the target population. The results obtained via content analysis signal that the extent of conformity of hotels to technology and accessibility requirements in line with the adoption of the related SDGs depend on the creation of practical solutions on the educational, legal and managerial perspectives. The chapter contributes to academic literature in tourism management and brings suggestions for tourism practitioners to adapt and improve their services to meet the standards and requirements of SDGs related to accessibility and adoption of technology in hospitality services.

The tourism industry is known to be both famous and infamous in a way that there is a blurred line between how much tourism is sustainable and how much it is not. However, there is no denying of the fact that the industry is in need of innovative and upgraded mechanisms to ensure sustainability. Technology, on the other hand, is making great strides in providing support to ensure sustainable development across various sectors. Taking cues from the existing work, this chapter investigates the various facets of technology in imbibing sustainability, especially in the tourism sector, and proposes a framework for technology-led sustainable tourism development process. The chapter concludes that both technology and sustainable development concept share the common principles of being holistic, futuristic and interrelated (integrated). Therefore, technology can be a proper solution to develop a sustainable model.

Rapid development of IT and communication technologies resulted in the “Smart” concept, which of late has become quite popular. The smart concept signifies the integration of organizational networks and smart features that enrich the ecosystem, facilitate daily activities for all stakeholders, and for automatization. Smart concept was discussed as a complicated technological infrastructure in urban areas intended to promote economic, social and environmental welfare. The latest technological developments gave rise to the concepts of smart planet, smart city and smart destination that have become important in recent years. Technological innovations have had a big influence on the development of the tourism industry. Smart concept is conceptualized as smart tourism for tourism sector. Smart Tourism generally has a positive effect on the rapid change of information and technology and on the tourism sector, tourism activities and increase in customer satisfaction. In this chapter, the concept of Smart and its smart technologies are explained and information about its reflections on the tourism sector and smart tourism destinations are discussed.

The change in the technological environment within the macro-environment factors in recent years affects states, businesses, societies and individuals and concerns not only technology-based sectors but also many fields. In particular, trends such as artificial intelligence, metaverse, robotics, advanced connectivity, the Internet of Things, big data, small data, blockchain, cloud technologies and reality technologies, which are called new technology, are developing very quickly compared to the past and expanding their global usage areas. Creating strategies and policies without considering these factors creates problems in many areas. These problems are marketing, competition, cost, efficiency and productivity.

Reality technologies, which are the research area in this chapter and enable users to interact with the digital world, have a wide application area in the tourism industry. With technological tools such as smartphones and virtual reality (VR) glasses; personalisation, interactive experience, information gathering and decision-making; many different solutions are produced in areas such as education, service and security. Along with its many advantages, the disadvantages of reality technologies and the negative outputs of this transformation are significant for the understanding and future of the subject.

This research aims to explore the potential of big data technology for sustainable management and investigate its impact on tourism. Its goal is to obtain meaningful results related to sustainable tourism to understand better how big data technology plays a role in decision-making by looking at it through the lens of various studies.

A systematic review, which is a qualitative method, was used in this study. The analysis was conducted using secondary data from the Web of Science Core Collections databases.

Big data technology has many economic benefits for businesses, but it also has managerial benefits such as forecasting, decision-making and tracking human and machine behaviour. Furthermore, big data technology offers sustainability benefits such as resource efficiency, preventive quality systems, carbon reduction and environmentally friendly production.

Big data's capabilities enable businesses to make more informed business decisions, improve overall business performance and contribute to achieving various SDGs. Big data, which aids in developing smart and sustainable tourism in the tourism sector, assists tourism managers in making economically, socially and environmentally sound decisions.

The intervention of information communication technology and technological advancements are rapidly growing and providing means of improvisations to every industry. The technological advancements have offered multifold opportunities to the businesses and other stakeholders for developing it multidimensionality. This chapter has explored the aspects of the possible economic developments because of technological developments of the industry. Overall, 167 papers have been found and analysed. Probably, this is the first paper of its type, which has investigated the relationship between technology, tourism, and economic development using the bibliometric analysis. This chapter also identifies the five important clusters of keywords for future researchers on this theme of research.

The conceptualization of smart emerged by technological advancements penetrated the tourism industry with the pace of globalization transformed the destinations providing digitalized products. Even though smart tourism destinations are initiated by advanced technologies, the notion evolved in embracing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) project economic, social, and environmental proliferation. A tourism destination is counted as “smart” which provides advanced technologies to improve the quality of tourists' experiences and enhance the residents' quality of life. The structure of a smart tourism destination is established on four basic pillars that cover technology, innovation, accessibility, and sustainability issues. Designating the notion of smart into tourism destinations is extremely vital since the shifting paradigm of tourists’ demands concern sustainability. The development of smart in a tourism destination is a crucial concern for destination management organizations (DMOs) integrating key destination components with the dimensions of a smart city to enhance the tourists' satisfaction and competitiveness of the destination. Therefore, one aim of this chapter is to elucidate the association between key destination components with the dimensions of a smart city to reveal the related smart tourism destination applications. Moreover, cultural heritage in smart tourism destinations forms an important part of tourism both with its tangible and intangible resources which have been involved in the emergent era of digitalization inevitably with all parties and processes. Hence, another aim of this chapter is to examine the dimensional shift in cultural heritage tourism within the framework of digitalization. Sharing cases of digitization of cultural heritage from different parts of the world, this chapter also reflects that it is inevitable to benefit from digitization and ICTs in order to reach the SDGs on the scale of smart tourism destinations. Analysis of academic publications and the national and international reports of the related authorities sums the methodology used to conclude the study with suggestions of future research paths to develop the field.