Tracking Technologies in Tourism: A Bibliometric and Content Review

Abstract

Understanding how tourists move within a destination can give an important contribution to the planning and management of destinations, particularly in terms of their impacts. Therefore, studying the spatial and temporal behaviour of tourists, namely their physical movements in space and time, implies resorting to a set of techniques that enable the tracking of their movements. This paper intends to identify the most important tracking technologies on tourism research and its major advantages and disadvantages. Based on a literature review, this study provides a critical review of the most important tracking technologies in tourism research divided into two phases, a quantitative analysis based on the Scopus database and a bibliometric analysis coupled with a manual analysis of documents (content analysis).