Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research

Walking and Working with AI: AI-Enabled Tourism Research and Practices

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the tourism industry and the way tourism research itself is conducted. From service robots, chatbots, and AI-powered trip planning to AI-enabled analysis of reviews, social media, and mobility data, AI is reshaping how tourism experiences are designed, delivered, and how tourism research is conducted. This Special Issue seeks high-quality contributions at the intersection of AI and tourism. Particular emphasis is placed on collaboration between AI and practitioners in tourism management, collaboration between AI and tourism researchers across the scientific workflow, and the ethical implications of AI adoption in tourism research and practice. The Special Issue also focuses on using AI in innovative ways to address/investigate long-standing tourism problems/topics, or investigating novel tourism problems that AI applications create. By foregrounding collaboration, ethics, and innovation, this Special Issue aims to establish rigorous and responsible foundations for AI-enabled research and practice in tourism.

We invite submissions including, but not limited to:

1.  AI–Practitioner Collaboration in Tourism Practice: Human–AI collaboration within the tourism workforce. It includes the use of service robots and chatbots alongside employees, augmentation versus replacement of tourism jobs, algorithmic management and control of tourism workers, job redesign and reskilling, employee wellbeing, trust and acceptance of AI co-workers, and new models of human–AI service co-production.
2. AI–Researcher Collaboration in Tourism Scholarship: Human–AI and AI–AI collaboration models across the tourism research workflow. It includes any phase of the academic research cycle, such as AI-enabled research topic selection, hypothesis development, literature review, methodology formulation, data collection, analysis, result evaluation, and paper composition.
3. AI-Driven Methodology and Theory Development: Development of AI-driven methodologies to support tourism research, practice, and theory development. Examples include large language model-based analysis of reviews and social media, multi-agent simulation of tourist behaviour, AI-driven demand forecasting, systematic literature analysis, causal AI-enhanced experimental design, and AI simulation for theory development. Purely technical contributions without clear relevance to tourism will not be considered by this Special Issue.
4. AI-Enabled Tourism Experience Design and Operations Management: Applications of AI across the full cycle of designing tourism experiences and managing the operations that deliver them. In terms of experience, example topics include the use of generative AI in trip planning, AI-based personalisation and recommendations, conversational agents and virtual tour guides, immersive and augmented-reality experience design, and AI-enabled accessibility and inclusive experience design. On the operations side, example topics include AI-driven revenue management and dynamic pricing, visitor flow and crowd management, intelligent staffing and resource scheduling, AI-based service-quality monitoring, and smart destination operations.
5. Ethics and Responsible AI in Tourism: Ethical implications of AI adoption in tourism, including privacy and surveillance, algorithmic bias and fairness, transparency and accountability, digital divide among tourists and destinations, and governance frameworks for responsible AI use by tourism organisations and destination management organisations. It also covers the responsible use of large language models and AI agents in tourism research, including the validity and hallucination risks of AI-generated content, bias in AI-assisted analysis, transparency of AI involvement, and frameworks/measures for safeguarding research integrity in human–AI collaboration.
6. AI-Driven Innovation in Tourism: Contributions engaging innovation of AI applications and the novel problems their applications create. It includes using AI in innovative ways to address/investigate long-standing tourism problems/topics (e.g., overtourism, labour shortages, competitiveness, and sustainability), or investigating novel problems that AI applications create (e.g., AI-generated misinformation and fake reviews, homogenisation of tourism experiences due to AI recommendations, and over-reliance on AI in decision-making).