Digital Transformation for Sustainable Tourism: Evaluating the Role of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and Smart Technologies in Destination Management

Tourism growth has intensified pressure on destinations through congestion, resource demand and greenhouse gas emissions, while digital technologies are rapidly changing how destinations are managed. This article examines how artificial intelligence (AI), big data and smart technologies can support sustainable destination management, focusing on four functions: visitor management, reduction of resource consumption, monitoring of environmental impacts, and sustainable tourism planning. Using an integrative narrative review of a purposive corpus of 25 peer-reviewed studies and institutional reports, the article (i) maps digital technologies to destination-management functions (Table 1), (ii) proposes a conceptual framework linking data sources, analytics, management functions and sustainability outcomes (Figure 1), and (iii) derives indicators for evaluating digital interventions (Table 2). The synthesis suggests that the evidence is strongest for visitor-behaviour sensing and demand forecasting, and more conceptual and fragmented for resource and environmental benefits. Digital tools can improve the timeliness and spatial precision of decisions, but they do not by themselves address structural drivers such as growth in tourism consumption, and they introduce risks of data bias, privacy loss, and the energy footprint of AI. The article argues that digital transformation contributes to sustainability when it is embedded in governance, combined with demand-management and decarbonization policy, and evaluated against outcome indicators rather than technology adoption.