More than ‘travel tools’: Shifting the representation of smartphones in tourism research

Tourism and smartphones are interconnected with businesses embedding smartphone functionality into their services and tourists using smartphones to travel. Subsequently, understanding contemporary tourism requires knowing the tourism-based roles of smartphones. However, reviews of tourism studies have found it limited by an adherence to instrumental and humanist representations of smartphones as passive tools. I assess this claim through a systematic review and thematic analysis of recent tourism studies research, investigating whether smartphones are represented as having agency and identifying the theories of technology deployed. I find that tourism scholarship has moved away from strict instrumental and humanist framings of smartphones by acknowledging that the devices have a degree of agency, but aspects of this traditional approach remain; including smartphones being understood by their worth to humans. As such, this article suggests that important future lines of enquiry for tourism studies are made possible by posthuman and more-than-human accounts of technology.