Beyond Infrastructure: Mapping the Gap between Digital Capability and Consumer Trust in Travel Intermediaries (2016-2025)

Vollständiger Abstract

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This study maps the thematic structure of the literature on digitalization in travel businesses and traces how that structure changed over a ten-year period. The aim is not only to summarize publication activity but to read the meaning patterns in study abstracts and to describe the field at the level of content. A corpus of 391 studies published between 2016 and 2025 was drawn from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The corpus was examined with a mixed design that combines a descriptive performance analysis with a text-mining thematic analysis of abstracts. Term frequency and inverse document frequency weighting was applied to the abstracts, and the resulting matrix was decomposed into six components with nonnegative matrix factorization. The analysis shows that the field is organized around six themes: adoption of information and communication technologies, acceptance and trust, destination image and tour operators, online reviews and online travel agency ratings, social media and digital marketing, and digital transformation and artificial intelligence. The adoption theme declined over time, while the artificial intelligence and consumer trust themes rose. A co-occurrence analysis shows that firm-centered transformation and consumer-centered trust remain largely separate at the level of abstract language, since only 4.3 percent of the abstracts address both at once. The study proposes an integrative agenda that connects firm digital capability with consumer trust, and argues that travel agencies and tour operators are the natural setting in which to test this connection. For practice, the findings indicate that investment in digital and artificial intelligence tools creates value only when it is positioned to strengthen consumer trust. Keywords Digitalization, Travel businesses, Consumer trust, Competitive advantage