Resolving the accessibility–sustainability friction: technology's role in including disadvantaged groups in green tourism

Purpose Technologies adopted to green tourism destinations (car-free zones, paperless ticketing, app-only wayfinding) can unintentionally exclude disadvantaged and vulnerable travellers, yet accessibility, sustainability and technology research largely evaluate this problem separately. This review maps, classifies and examines the literature at this intersection and translates the findings into a practical framework for destination managers. Design/methodology/approach Following PRISMA 2020 and PRISMA-S, searches of Scopus and Web of Science, supplemented by two keyword-variant rounds, yielded 33 studies (2016–2026). Each study was deductively coded for Enablers, Friction Points and Reconciliation Pathways and cross-checked against an exploratory four-topic Latent Dirichlet Allocation model. Findings Two-thirds of studies (66.7%) discuss a technology that lowers accessibility barriers, but only 39.4% discuss a pathway reconciling it with sustainability goals, and 27.3% discuss both. The gap is sharpest in older-adult/silver-tourism technology research and smallest in virtual/heritage-technology research. Cross-tabulating the two categories yields the Green-Inclusive Technology Alignment (GITA) matrix: Aligned (27.3%), Enabler Blind-Spot (39.4%), Process-Only (12.1%) and Unexamined (21.2%). Sensitivity checks show the pattern is robust to eligibility tier and study type. Practical implications GITA is operationalised as an eight-step audit checklist that destination management organisations, hotel operators and city planners can apply before adopting a technology, so that accessibility–sustainability trade-offs are checked rather than assumed away. Originality/value To the authors' knowledge, this is the first review to jointly map, deductively classify and topic-model the literature on technology's dual role in tourism accessibility and sustainability, contributing a diagnostic classification logic (GITA) and an evidence-grounded, practitioner-facing audit tool.