Call for papers - Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence

2025-12-16

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the global tourism landscape, redefining how destinations operate, how travelers make decisions, and how experiences are created, delivered, and evaluated. From intelligent recommendation systems and predictive analytics to generative AI in marketing and immersive virtual environments, AI technologies are pushing the boundaries of innovation and reshaping tourism ecosystems.

While AI-driven innovations promise greater efficiency, personalization, and competitiveness, they also raise complex social, ethical, and organizational questions. How will AI affect authenticity, creativity, and human interaction in tourism? What new forms of collaboration, governance, and skill development are required to ensure responsible, inclusive, and sustainable implementation?

This Special Issue seeks to advance scholarly understanding of how AI is shaping the next era of tourism innovation. By drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from tourism studies, computer science, information systems, management, and the social sciences, it aims to foster critical dialogue and support both conceptual and empirical contributions to this rapidly evolving field.

Aims and Scope

This Special Issue aims to:

  • Explore how AI technologies are driving innovation across tourism sectors.
  • Investigate the opportunities and challenges associated with integrating AI into tourism systems, operations, and policymaking.
  • Examine the social, ethical, experiential, and organizational dimensions of AI adoption.
  • Encourage cross-disciplinary research linking AI developments in other industries to tourism applications.
  • Support the development of frameworks for responsible, sustainable, and human-centered AI-driven tourism innovation.

We welcome both theoretical and empirical contributions using qualitative, quantitative, mixed-method, experimental, or computational approaches.

Suggested Topics

Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

  • AI and the transformation of destination management and marketing
  • Machine learning and predictive analytics in tourism demand forecasting
  • Generative AI in tourism communication, storytelling, and design
  • Chatbots, virtual assistants, and the future of tourist engagement
  • Smart tourism ecosystems and intelligent infrastructure
  • AI-driven personalization and visitor experience design
  • Automation, robotics, and workforce implications in tourism and hospitality
  • Ethical, governance, and regulatory challenges in AI-based tourism innovation
  • Data privacy, transparency, and trust in AI applications
  • Cross-sectoral AI innovations and lessons for tourism from other domains
  • The role of AI in promoting sustainability and responsible travel behavior

Expected Contributions

We invite submissions that deepen both theoretical and practical understanding of AI-driven tourism innovation. Contributions should articulate how AI is transforming not only operations but also values, behaviors, business models, and institutional frameworks within tourism.

Submissions are especially encouraged that:

  • Provide novel theoretical insights into the AI–innovation nexus in tourism.
  • Present comparative, regional, or cross-cultural analyses of AI adoption.
  • Examine intersections between technology, human experience, sustainability, and ethics.
  • Offer interdisciplinary perspectives linking tourism with data science, psychology, design, ethics, or organizational studies.

 

Submission guidelines

If you don't have an account on our platform, you can register here.

When submitting your paper, please choose this section: Special issue: Artificial Intelligence and add a note to the editors, specifying that you are submitting for the special issue. Please, also add SI before the title of your article. 

Please prepare your submission according to the general author guidelines for our journal.

Deadline: 1 March 2026

 

Guest Editors

Dr. M. Rajesh
Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Aarupadai Veedu Institute of Technology,
Vinayaka Mission’s Research Foundation (DU), Tamil Nadu, India
Email: rajesh.avcs0108@avit.ac.in
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.in/citations?user=URsPAh8AAAAJ&hl=en

Dr. Sathees Kumar Nataraj
University of Technology, Bahrain
Salmabad, Kingdom of Bahrain
Email: satheesjuly4@gmail.com; sknataraj@utb.edu.bh
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com.my/citations?user=P1VN5PsAAAAJ&hl=en