From Digital Infrastructures to AI-Driven Sustainable and Resilient Tourism Ecosystems: A Longitudinal Evolutionary Framework

This study examines how tourism platform ecosystems have evolved into mechanisms supporting sustainable, resilient, and digitally transformed tourism systems amid rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), immersive technologies, and data-driven platform governance. While previous research has extensively explored smart tourism technologies and digital transformation, limited attention has been devoted to understanding how tourism platforms have evolved from digital infrastructures into ecosystem-level coordination mechanisms shaping sustainability, resilience, adaptive governance, and digitally mediated stakeholder interactions in tourism marketing. To address this gap, the study develops a longitudinal evolutionary analysis of tourism platform ecosystems by combining a bibliometric analysis of 447 Web of Science-indexed publications (2015–2026) with an exploratory discourse analysis of Booking.com corporate communications. The findings reveal a progressive transformation of tourism platforms from digital infrastructure ecosystems (2015–2019) to adaptive coordination systems (2020–2022) and, ultimately, to AI-driven intelligent ecosystem orchestrators (2023–2026). Across these stages, tourism research increasingly integrates AI-enabled personalization, conversational interaction, immersive technologies, ecosystem governance, sustainability coordination, destination resilience, predictive analytics, and customer engagement. The study proposes a longitudinal evolutionary framework explaining how tourism platforms transition toward intelligent ecosystem orchestration supporting sustainability-oriented governance, adaptive destination management, personalized visitor experiences, and long-term competitiveness. The framework advances an ecosystem intelligence perspective that extends existing digitalization and technology-adoption narratives within tourism research.