Tourism Planning & Development

Intelligent Transformation of Tourism Development in Asia-Pacific

Tourism is entering a new phase of intelligent transformation in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes how destinations are imagined, planned, governed, experienced, and developed. AI technologies, such as generative AI, predictive analytics, recommendation algorithms, digital twins, autonomous systems, and agentic AI, are no longer peripheral innovations. These innovations increasingly mediate tourism decision-making across multiple scales, from individual trip planning and mobility patterns to regional development strategies and national tourism policies. For example, generative AI tools are rapidly transforming travel planning and tourist cognition, while algorithmic recommendation systems are increasingly shaping the formation of tourism demand and destination competitiveness. Recent tourism scholarship suggests that AI is increasingly functioning not merely as a technological tool, but as an active co-creator within tourism ecosystems that influences tourist decision-making, destination visibility, mobility patterns, and governance arrangements. 

At the destination level, AI is also reshaping the knowledge infrastructure of tourism planning by enabling real-time data collection, demand forecasting, visitor-flow prediction, scenario modelling, and evidence-informed decision-making. These capabilities are changing how tourism planners, destination management organizations, policymakers, technology firms, and local stakeholders diagnose development problems, allocate resources, manage risks, and imagine future destination pathways. The rise of intelligent tourism systems, therefore, represents not merely a technological transition but a broader socio-technical and political transformation that requires new theoretical and practical understandings of tourism planning and development. 

Despite the growing body of AI-related tourism research, existing studies have largely concentrated on service innovation, tourist experience, marketing automation, smart hospitality, and technology acceptance. Comparatively less attention has been paid to how AI transforms tourism planning and development at the destination, regional, and policy levels. This gap is important because intelligent technologies do not simply enhance tourism operations; they also reorganize destination governance, reshape spatial flows, redistribute visibility among places, and influence which communities, businesses, and destinations benefit from digital transformation. A Special Issue on this topic is therefore timely because it moves the discussion beyond technological efficiency toward the broader developmental, institutional, ethical, and spatial consequences of AI in tourism.

The Asia-Pacific region provides one of the most important and theoretically fertile contexts for examining these intelligent transformations. The region represents a unique convergence of rapid tourism growth, digital innovation, urban transformation, and uneven development trajectories. Countries such as China, Singapore, and South Korea are leaders in smart tourism, AI adoption, platform economies, and digital governance.

At the same time, many Southeast Asian and Pacific destinations simultaneously face significant challenges related to infrastructure inequality, sustainability pressures, tourism dependency, and governance fragmentation. This coexistence of technological advancement and developmental diversity creates an ideal environment for examining how intelligent tourism systems interact with different political, economic, cultural, and institutional contexts. In this regard, the Asia-Pacific should not be understood as a homogeneous digital frontier, but as a highly diverse regional context in which advanced smart cities, emerging platform economies, rural destinations, island communities, heritage sites, and climate-vulnerable destinations experience AI-driven transformation in uneven ways. This diversity offers a valuable empirical setting for examining both the opportunities and risks of intelligent tourism development, including digital divides, algorithmic bias, data dependency, platform dominance, and unequal access to intelligent infrastructure.

Furthermore, the region faces urgent tourism development challenges, including overtourism, environmental degradation, climate vulnerability, urban congestion, heritage commodification, and regional inequality. For example, rapidly increasing visitor flows continue to generate significant pressures on local infrastructure, sustainability governance, and community well-being. AI technologies are increasingly positioned as solutions to these challenges through predictive analytics, intelligent mobility management, real-time monitoring systems, and sustainability governance tools. Importantly, the Asia-Pacific has emerged as a global laboratory for experimental forms of intelligent tourism development, including AI-powered destination management, immersive tourism ecosystems, autonomous mobility systems, and emerging agentic AI applications. These developments make the region especially significant for advancing scholarship on future-oriented tourism planning and development. 

Accordingly, this Special Issue seeks to advance interdisciplinary and critical understandings of how intelligent technologies reshape tourism planning and development. In line with the mission of Tourism Planning & Development, this Special Issue welcomes theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous contributions that critically engage with the social, environmental, cultural, and economic implications of intelligent tourism transformation in the Asia-Pacific. By doing so, this Special Issue aims to establish a forward-looking research agenda that positions AI not simply as a tourism technology but as a transformative force reshaping the future of tourism planning, governance, and development across the Asia-Pacific region.

 Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

·      Generative AI and Tourism Planning Future

·      Agentic AI and Autonomous Tourism Management Systems

·      Platformization and Algorithmic Governance

·      AI-mediated Trip Planning and Tourist Mobility

·      AI-mediated Labor and Socioeconomic Transformation

·      AI Adoption and Sustainable Tourism Development

·      AI-driven Reconfiguration of Tourism Planning

·      AI-driven Tourism Business Innovation in Regional Development