Applications, ethics, and future agenda of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in tourism and hospitality: a systematic review

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping how tourism information is produced, exchanged, and consumed, yet its application scenarios, ethical consequences, and implications for service authenticity remain dispersed across a fast-growing literature. Following the PRISMA 2020 protocol, this study identifies 3,825 records from the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus and conducts a thematic synthesis of 461 publications, addressing three questions: where GenAI creates value on the supply and demand sides of tourism and hospitality, which ethical risks and organizational dilemmas accompany its adoption, and how machine intervention conflicts with interactional authenticity in service encounters. The synthesis indicates that GenAI operates as a double-edged sword. On the demand side, conversational and multimodal systems lower information search and decision-making costs; on the supply side, automated content generation unlocks operational capacity—yet these gains coexist with algorithmic bias and hallucination, privacy trade-offs, and employee deskilling. In service interactions, the computational essence of machine-generated empathy can elicit expectancy violations and algorithm aversion, weakening the interpersonal authenticity on which hospitality depends. The review integrates these findings into an efficacy-risk hedging framework embedded in a socio-technical account of human-AI collaboration and derives a tiered human-in-the-loop governance model. Its primary contribution is to link application-level benefits, systemic risks, and the authenticity conflict within one evidence-based framework, with each claim anchored in article-level evidence counts.