Introduction

Abstract

In the past twenty years we have seen changes in technology that have reconfigured the way in which tourists plan, travel, reflect and share experiences. These changes have caused us to reconsider how tourists travel and how they make decisions, as well as how destinations market themselves. The now ubiquitous use of mobile phones has been documented as being a major influence (Wang, Park and Fesenmaier, 2012). Yet, while large swathes of research have focused on the use of technology and the impact that technology has had upon tourists’ decision making, there is comparatively far less research that concentrates on using technology to understand where tourists travel to, and how they move between destinations and attractions. The tourism industry has been documented as lagging far further behind than other industries in its use of technology, particularly that which delivers research insights (Eccleston, Hardy and Hyslop, 2020). The reasons for this have not yet been explored in great detail, but they are quite possibly due to the fact that the tourism industry is dominated by small to medium sized businesses whose capacity for expenditure on the use of technology and research is limited, relative to other industry sectors such as mining and forestry. A second reason is that tourism is reliant on an element that is often far harder to control – people. Unlike sectors that use biological elements as their key resources, and can place sensors where needed without requiring consent, tourism’s reliance on humans and their interaction with technology makes tracking far more complex. A third reason is that tourism arguably lags behind other sectors because the methods available to the industry to track and understand mobility involve complex technology, and different methods require specialist analytical skills. The Director General of the World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, argued that decision makers are facing an ‘infodemic’ as a result of large swathes of data being made available in order to assist understanding the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic (Zarocostas, 2020). The plethora of options facing the industry in regards to which technology to use and how, is undoubtedly adding to this lag.