Driving hospitality and tourism to foster sustainable innovation: A systematic review of COVID-19-related studies and practical implications in the digital era

Abstract

Sustainable innovation is a solution for the hospitality and tourism (H&T) industries to cope with the COVID-19 crisis, build resilience, and ensure survival post-pandemic. The primary aim of our review is to systematically identify and critically review the literature on sustainable innovation in H&T amid COVID-19 (conducted in 2020 and 2021), in order to synthesize and classify prevalent types, antecedents, and outcomes of sustainable innovation. The authors present a comprehensive review of the 58 articles on sustainable innovation in H&T through the Web of Science (WoS) database, spanning over 2 years (2020–2021). This review demonstrates that since the beginning of COVID-19, H&T have strongly mobilized network technologies (especially social media and digital platforms) and data-processing technologies (especially Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)) in comparison with physical-digital interface technologies (especially Virtual Reality (VR)), while physical-digital process technologies remain very limited in these industries. Several relevant antecedents of the adoption of sustainable innovation, more specifically digital technologies, have been identified at multiple levels of analysis, including the organizational, managerial, and stakeholder levels. Our research also reveals several consequences of the adoption of sustainable innovation in H&T. These consequences were congregated according to the three main dimensions related to sustainability in economic, social, and environmental outcomes. This study provides important practical implications for the H&T sectors in the digital era and post-pandemic. The current research is the first study to systematically and critically review sustainable innovation in an H&T context.