The world is digitalising rapidly, and the tourism industry was among the first to jump upon this bandwagon. Research has revealed that aspects of digitalization have significantly impacted tourist behaviour, among them use of social media, and digital tourist information. The question is what these behavioural aspects mean for the tourism system pe se? The argument of this presentation is that the influence of digitalization does not stop with stating empirically that many people read information on a screen instead of on paper, or that they produce information instead of merely consuming it. Rather, the current project asks what digitalization does to our understanding of a destination, to what tourism and the tourist is, or how we are to understand the tourism system, once launched by Leiper in the late 1970s.
The presentation is departing from a conceptual paper in the making, that is based on a mixture of empirical tourism studies related to digitalization, and theoretical discussions in the literature about what tourism in an era of globalization and digitalization is – and what it is not.