Chinese senior travelers encounter with smart tourism: why are they falling into the travel digital divide?

The intertwining trends of smart tourism and population aging have created intense contradictions, leading to digital divides among senior travelers. However, extant scholarship has marginalized the initiative of senior travelers, obscuring the intricate generative mechanisms of digital divides. Utilizing a two-stage methodological design and abductive reasoning approach, we elucidated the generative mechanisms of senior travelers' digital divide. Our findings revealed that senior travelers' multifaceted identities and roles, tourism technology cognition, tourism technology affordances collectively construct contextual, conceptual and judgment foundations of digital divides. The synergy of these three factors drives the cycle of the digital divide dilemma. Meanwhile, senior travelers rationally mitigate expected usage divide through technological assistance and proxies from offspring or tour guides. This study reflects on technological elitism, reveals seniors' initiative and characteristics in senior travelers’ digital divide, thereby enriching digital divide theory. It also provides practical insights for achieving inclusive tourism experiences in smart tourism.