From mass marketing to personalized digital marketing in tourism: a 2050 horizon paper

What is it about?

The academic background of tourism marketing dates back to the 1960s. There had been a slight increase in its capacity until the early 1990s. However, since then, it has boomed, reaching thousands of journal articles and hundreds of books published only in English each year. Therefore, this study aims to present how tourism marketing has progressed academically within the last 60 years over four periods. A bibliometric analysis grounds this study that characterizes the past and present of literature on tourism marketing. A total of 9,239 articles, published between 1969 and 2024, were extracted from the Scopus. Software packages such as VOSviewer were used to determine connections within topics. Findings were assessed under four waves. Despite the limited size of papers at the early stage, there has been a boom in the last wave and a diversified number and category of subjects studied. In each wave, new subjects were added making the picture broader. Recommendations for industry practitioners and policymakers focus on carefully assessing trends in marketing tourism services and how these may be shaped in the near future. This may help the practitioners and policymakers redesign their services and marketing strategies.

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