Smart tourism: State of the art and literature review for the last six years

In the modern era, the tourism sector has grown to be one of the dominant sectors globally while technology continues to evolve. These facts have given birth to the “Smart Tourism” concept which can be characterized as a progression from traditional tourism. In order to realize an actual Smart Tourism experience, the proper services need to be delivered to the right user at the right time with the best possible way. During the last six years, there has been a significant amount of research in the Smart Tourism field which, to the best of our knowledge, have not yet been presented in a thorough literature review. In this paper, after carefully reviewing a wide number of papers, we have managed to identify the most commonly used approaches and basic concepts in the Smart Tourism sector and present them in detail along with the papers that focus on them. In this study, “key concepts” include: Privacy Preserving, Context Awareness, Cultural Heritage, Recommender Systems, Social Media, Internet of Things, User Experience, Real Time, User Modeling, Augmented Reality and Big Data. At the same time, major Smart Tourism challenges are presented so as to lay the foundations for future researches in the field.