Artificial Intelligence in Tourism Businesses: Financial Resilience, Organisational Adaptation and Performance Drivers—A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping tourism businesses by improving decision making, service personalization, operational efficiency, and data-driven management. Beyond these organizational benefits, AI may also strengthen firms’ capacity to cope with market volatility, demand shocks, cost pressures, and other sources of financial fragility. This study provides a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of 146 Web of Science articles on AI in tourism published between 2019 and 2023. Following a structured screening process, it identifies the intellectual structure, thematic evolution, and main performance-related drivers associated with AI adoption. The findings show a rapidly expanding field centered on business performance, information technology, big data, robotics, and AI-enabled service innovation. The literature suggests that AI contributes to resilience by enhancing forecasting, resource allocation, customer management, and organizational adaptability under uncertainty. However, explicitly financial perspectives—such as financial vulnerability, resilience, liquidity, solvency, and risk management—remain underdeveloped. This study contributes by reframing AI in tourism as a potential resilience-building capability rather than only a tool for service innovation. Its main limitations are the reliance on Web of Science and a fixed 2019–2023 bibliometric corpus, which future research should extend.