Transforming to a Sustainable Visitor Economy With Information Systems

The global visitor economy sector, which includes tourism, hospitality and events, makes significant economic contributions. In 2023, there were 1.3 billion international tourist arrivals globally, with expenditure of $1.5 trillion (USD) (UN Tourism 2024). The Travel and Tourism sector contributed 9.1% to global GDP, a 23.2% rise from 2022, alongside 27 million new jobs, increased domestic spending surpassing pre-pandemic levels, and a substantial 33.1% boost in international spending, indicating that tourism has rebounded after the pandemic (World Travel and Tourism Council 2024). The global hospitality sector is worth around $4.7 trillion (USD) in 2023, with an annual growth rate of 7% (Hospitality Insights 2024). In the UK, the hospitality sector contributes significantly to the economy, contributing £93 billion (GBP) in 2023, supporting 3.5 million jobs as the third largest employer, and generating £54 billion (GBP) in tax revenue, £20 billion (GBP) in exports, and £7 billion (GBP) in business investment (UK Hospitality 2023). The global events sector, which primarily consists of sports, music events, conferences and festivals, was valued at $1.4 trillion (USD) (Claight 2024). Mega-events, such as the Olympics, have large economic impacts on the host country (Sato et al. 2024; Wolfe et al. 2022), including job creation and tourism revenues. For instance, the 2024 Paris Olympics is set to generate between €6.7 and €11.1 billion (EUR) net economic benefit to the region (Claight 2024) and create up to 247 000 jobs (CDES 2024). Concerts and world tours also impact economies, society and sustainability. Taylor Swift's Eras tour is estimated to have contributed £1 Billion (GBP) to the UK with spending on tickets, travel, accommodation and hospitality (Masud 2024). ABBA Voyage, a virtual concert in London, features avatars of the original band members created with motion capture technologies (ABBA Voyage 2024), boosted the London economy by £322 million (GBP) (Prynn 2024) and provides event goers with new types of entertainment. The visitor economy can also contribute to sustainability goals. For example, Cold Play's Music of the Spheres world tour aims to be as sustainable and low-carbon as possible (Cold Play 2024). In addition to the economic impact, the visitor economy also contributes to social and environmental sustainability, such as empowering women and young people in the workforce, transforming perceptions through intercultural encounters, advancing heritage preservations through educating and engaging with stakeholders, improving quality of life and reducing inequality in developing countries through community development. A sustainable visitor economy is crucial due to its scale, multifaceted benefits and potential impacts. Its importance is particularly evident as a significant economic driver in the destination and benefits the host community (Arnegger and Herz 2016). It has great potential for promoting social stability, cultural preservation and community engagement (Besculides, Lee, and McCormick 2002; Webster and Ivanov 2014). On the one hand, tourism, hospitality and events are a positive force in achieving sustainability goals (Higgins-Desbiolles 2006); on the other hand, there are many unethical and irresponsible environmental and local community issues (Buckley 2012; Milano, Novelli, and Cheer 2019), for example, due to its dependence and entanglement with fragile natural resources (Sisneros-Kidd et al. 2019), and the amount of waste generated (Diaz-Farina, Díaz-Hernández, and Padrón-Fumero 2023). It is, thus, essential to develop and implement sustainable strategies that maximize the positive impacts of the visitor economy while effectively addressing and mitigating its negative consequences, ensuring that the visitor economy supports a sustainability agenda that serves multiple stakeholders. Visitor economy outlets often refer to information technology (IT) over IS, and has long been extensively used in the visitor economy (Cai, Richter, and McKenna 2019; Navío-Marco, Ruiz-Gómez, and Sevilla-Sevilla 2018). Examples published within tourism, hospitality or events journals are broad. For example, recent research has explored artificial intelligence (AI) service failure (Lv et al. 2021), the impact of AI on tourism firms (Li and Chen 2024) and luxury hospitality (Gonçalves et al. 2024). Robotics has also been of recent interest across the visitor economy, for example, robots in tourism services (Liu et al. 2025), robot service failure in hospitality settings (Liu and Wang 2025), and the use of robots in events (Webster and Ivanov 2022). Other recent interests include virtual tourism (Liu, Moyle, et al. 2024), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality in tourism (Bec et al. 2021) and augmented reality (AR) in science festivals (Olya et al. 2020). However, there are few examples of visitor economy research in information systems (IS). Examples with a sustainability focus include sustainable ICT capability (Gholami et al. 2017), marine animal conservation (Tan 2018) and sustainable tourism in developing countries (Tsokota, von Solms, and van Greunen 2017). We believe that IS research can bring new insights and produce new knowledge for a sustainable digital visitor economy. In some of our previous work in tourism (Cai and McKenna 2021; Cai et al. 2021), we called on ‘information technology and tourism’ researchers to draw more from IS's rich history of theoretical development and methodological approaches. Thus encouraging tourism researchers to enhance their theoretical and methodological development. In this editorial, we call for IS researchers to work with the visitor economy to create a vibrant cross-disciplinary research community and bring to light the opportunities for us to research sustainable visitor economies. We see that opportunities in this field are numerous for impactful research. The motivation for this special issue was to uncover how IS research can bring new insights and produce new knowledge for a sustainable digital visitor economy, which includes the tourism, hospitality and events sectors. In the next section, we provide an overview of the role that IS can play in the visitor economy and offer illustrative examples of how IS can transform this sector by enhancing efficiency, personalisation and sustainability. IS can drive innovation and sustainable practices, making the visitor economy more responsive to the needs of all stakeholders. Following this, we offer a cross-disciplinary research agenda on transforming to a sustainable visitor economy, introduce the special issue papers and conclude with some remarks about the special issue. In the tourism sector, IT has been utilized by service providers, decision-makers or designers to provide sustainable solutions for the conservation of cultural heritage and endangered nature-based attractions. For instance, the role of smart technologies in heritage tourism development (Balakrishnan et al. 2023), machine learning in marine protected areas (Rezapouraghdam, Akhshik, and Ramkissoon 2023) and smart coastal destinations (Foronda-Robles, Galindo-Pérez-de-Azpillaga, and Fernández-Tabales 2023). Other research has showcased that user-generated content on social media has implications for the sustainability of whale-watching (León et al. 2025) and digital exhibitions utilizing VR in museums (Kim et al. 2019). In the hospitality sector, including hotels, restaurants, and health and wellbeing centres, among other service providers, IT-related research has explored using blockchain to mitigate food wastage (de Visser-Amundson, Kleijnen, and Aydinli 2023; Omar et al. 2024), the use of QR code menus as a sustainable solution (Ozturkcan and Kitapci 2023), using big data to understand emotions based on online reviews (Yu, et al. 2024), or to and 2024). In the smart and sustainable have been as the next and 2023). technology can be for example, to accommodation services and 2023). 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