Digital marketing in hospitality and tourism: A bibliometric journey and future research directions

This research carry out a bibliometric analysis of digital marketing research in the hospitality and tourism industry. By scrutinizing 139 publications indexed in Scopus between 2000–2025, this study applies methods such as performance analysis, co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and scientific mapping to generate the thematic cluster. A total of 139 documents were used for analysis, and the VOSviewer (association strength normalization, resolution = 1.0, keyword minimum occurrence = 10) was utilized to perform performance analysis and thematic clustering. To ensure reproducibility, the dataset was cleaned for duplicates and inclusion thresholds were set at a minimum of five citations or ten keyword occurrences. The study revealed that five themes emerged from the bibliographic coupling, namely: (1) Digital Skills, Technology Adoption, and Online Communication in Hospitality and Tourism; (2) Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) and Social Media Marketing in Hospitality and Tourism; (3) Digital Marketing Strategies and ICT in Hospitality and Tourism; (4) Digital Transformation and Emerging Technologies in Hospitality and Tourism; and (5) Digital Customer Engagement and Loyalty in Hospitality and Tourism. The findings of this research offer significant information to scholars concerning the present state of digital marketing literature within the hospitality and tourism sector. This indicates potential research paths for future investigation. Beyond academic contribution, the study offers practitioners actionable insights into how digital strategies such as eWOM, social media, and emerging technologies can be leveraged to enhance customer engagement and competitiveness.