Mapping Research Trends in AI-Based Tourism and Hospitality Marketing: A Bibliometric and Thematic Review

Artificial intelligence (AI) has fundamentally transformed tourism and hospitality marketing through enhanced data-driven decision-making, personalized customer experiences, and intelligent destination management. However, the field lacks a comprehensive synthesis of its intellectual landscape and thematic evolution, limiting understanding of research trajectories and emerging directions.

A systematic literature review following the SPAR-4-SLR procedure was conducted on 320 peer-reviewed papers published between 2003 and 2025, sourced from the Scopus database. Publication trends, leading journals, prolific authors, trending areas, and bibliographic coupling of documents and countries were visualized using bibliometric analysis tools (VOSviewer and Biblioshiny). Thematic analysis employed keyword co-occurrence networks to identify emerging research themes.

Academic publications on AI in tourism and hospitality demonstrated a significant surge during 2017-2020, reflecting the industry's growing emphasis on smart marketing applications. Thematic analysis identified four major research clusters: (i) Digital Influence and Tourist Behaviour Analytics; (ii) AI-Enabled Smart Tourism and Commerce Ecosystems; (iii) Technology-Driven Hospitality and Experience Innovation; and (iv) Data-Driven Decision Making in Predictive Tourism Modelling.

This bibliometric and thematic assessment reveals the evolving intellectual landscape of AI applications in tourism and hospitality marketing, documenting substantive research growth and the emergence of distinct thematic clusters that shape current and future research agendas in this dynamic field.