Chapter Abstract & Scholarly Scope

Few human activities are as old, as universal, or as deeply meaningful as travel, and few have been transformed as profoundly in the space of a single generation. The traveller who once depended on printed guidebooks, paper tickets, and the knowledge of local hosts now carries in a single device the power to plan, book, navigate, translate, and share an entire journey. Behind this quiet revolution lies the convergence of tourism with advanced information technology, a convergence that the field has come to call smart tourism, and it is the subject of this book. Yet technology alone does not tell the whole story. The most recent turn in industrial and technological thinking, captured in the idea of Industry 5.0, insists that the purpose of advanced technology is not efficiency or automation for their own sake, but the service of human wellbeing, environmental sustainability, and resilience. This book takes that insistence as its guiding thread. It examines the remarkable technologies now reshaping travel, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, big data analytics, immersive and distributed systems, and it asks throughout not merely what these technologies can do, but how they can be directed towards a tourism that is more human, more sustainable, and more resilient.