ICTs in hotel management: a research review

Purpose: Hotels are dependent on information and communication technologies (ICTs) for both their internal management and their relationships with customers and the other stakeholders. Therefore, research on ICTs in the hotel sector has kept growing lately. The purpose of this paper is to offer a review of the literature dedicated to ICTs in hotel management by analyzing papers published in seven prestigious journals in the field of Hospitality Management. Design/methodology/approach: The 147 papers analyzed – published over a 27-year period – have been studied according to a variety of criteria such as their research methods, perspective, statistics used, topics covered, technologies and authors and countries. Findings: The conclusions suggest a promising future regarding both ICT applications for hotel management and research in this area. Research limitations/implications: Concerning limitations, the most important one stems from the selection of works subject to examination because our analysis dealt with papers published in only seven journals, other publication sources have not been considered. Nevertheless, the present paper can prove useful both for researchers and hotel managers because new trends are emerging in both contexts with regard to technologies themselves as well as to some of their uses. Originality/value: One of the most important contributions made with this work is the preparation of a list with the topics covered by the papers under examination. Moreover, no studies have to date specifically tried to identify the technologies used in hotel management by means of a literature review.