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Smart tourism is a new buzzword applied to describe the increasing reliance of tourism destinations, their industries and their tourists on emerging forms of ICT that allow for massive amounts of data to be transformed into value propositions. However, it remains ill-defined as a concept, which hinders its theoretical development. The paper defines smart tourism, sheds light on current smart tourism trends, and then lays out its technological and business foundations. This is followed by a brief discussion on the prospects and drawbacks of smart tourism. The paper further draws attention to the great need for research to inform smart tourism development and management.

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Purpose This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of research on robotics in travel, tourism and hospitality, and to identify research gaps and directions for future research. Design/methodology/approach This paper analyzes 131 publications published during 1993-2019, identified via Scopus, Web of Science, ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Google Scholar. It offers quantitative analysis of frequencies and cross-tables and qualitative thematic analysis of the publications within each of seven identified domains. Findings The paper identifies “Robot,” “Human,” “Robot manufacturer,” “Travel/tourism/hospitality company,” “Servicescape,” “External environment” and “Education, training and research” as the research domains. Most research studies are dedicated to robots in restaurants, airports, hotels and bars. Papers tend to apply engineering methods, but experiments and surveys grow in popularity. Asia-Pacific countries account for much of the empirical research. Research limitations/implications The analysis was limited to publications indexed in four databases and one search engine. Only publications in English were considered. Growing opportunities for those who are anxious to publish in the field are identified. Importantly, emerging research is branching out from the engineering of robots to the possibilities for human/robot interactions and their use for service providers, opening up new avenues of research for tourism and hospitality scholars. Practical implications The paper identified a myriad of application areas for robots across various tourism and hospitality sectors. Service providers must critically think about how robots affect the servicescape and how it needs to be adjusted or re-imagined to ensure that robots and employees can augment the service experiences (co-)created within it. Originality/value This is the first study to systematically analyze research publications on robotics in travel, tourism and hospitality.

We propose that the literature on customer engagement has emphasized the benefits of customer engagement to the firm and to a large extent ignored the customers' perspective. By drawing upon co-creation and other literature, this paper attempts to alleviate this gap by proposing a strategic framework that aligns both the customer and firm perspectives in successfully creating engagement that generates value for both the customer and the bottom line. Design/methodology/approach: A strategic framework is proposed that includes the necessary firm resources, data, process, timeline and goals for engagement, and captures customers' motives, situational factors, and preferred engagement styles. Findings: We argue that sustainability of data-driven customer engagement require a dynamic and iterative value generation process involving 1) customers recognizing the value of engagement behaviours and 2) firm's ability to capture and passing value back to customers. Originality/value: This paper proposes a dynamic strategic value creation framework that comprehensively captures both the customer and firm perspectives to data-driven customer engagement.

PurposeThe study aims to use netnography to investigate the role of customers' contributions in social networks for NSD purposes.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopted an exploratory case study methodology to conduct a content analysis of customers' contributions in a social network, namely www.mystarbucksidea.com. Netnography was used for data analysis and interpretation.FindingsThe findings reveal that online customers' interactions and dialogues enable customers to share and understand the context of using services, which in turn triggers emotions and cognition that help customers to generate and further enhance ideas for new services. Thus, the variety of customers and the sharing of their diverse roles have a positive influence on enabling participants of online social networks to generate new service ideas.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings are applicable to the study's context, but future research should try to triangulate and enhance them by conducting studies in other contexts. The findings also provide ideas on how to further investigate the observational learning processes and behavioural impacts taking place amongst customers' interactions within online social networks.Practical implicationsThe findings provide several implications showing firms why and how to nurture, develop and moderate online customer interactions to enhance the effectiveness of their NSD processes.Originality/valueThe paper examines the role and the management of customers' contributions in social networks for NSD purposes. The topic has received only limited attention in traditional and online settings. Several suggestions for further research are also provided.

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