LAUSR

With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it has become even clearer that tourism is highly dependent on technological solutions. The continuing crisis calls for institutional innovation to conceptualize resilient, agile, and flexible strategic initiatives and operations (Gretzel, 2021). Smart technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, are creating an important driving force for travel, hospitality, and leisure (THL) during the pandemic and beyond, paving the way for new business models, new customer touchpoints, and new value (co-)creation opportunities. These technologies facilitate human experiences, support critical business processes, and enable important governance aspects. From the customer perspective, AI and robotics can provide structured automated services and enhanced experiences. From a firm perspective, they support customer engagement, the delivery of rich service, secure data acquisition, and increased employee productivity and efficiency (Alt, 2021). From a governance perspective, AI and robotics widen the action radius, allow for the adoption of new governance models, and propel efficiency to new levels. As such, they help realize smart tourism agendas with their important emphasis on sustainability, resilience, and enhanced wellbeing. Thus, there are good reasons to stress smart tourism and AI as an important topic for THL in the foreseeable future (Xiang, 2021). AI and robotics will have a tremendous impact on customers, businesses, and communities alike, and these impacts are expected to be especially profound in the THL context. Another important aspect of AI and robotics in the THL domain is their invaluable contribution to the preservation and appreciation of human achievements and representation of our collective cultural heritage. As the pandemic prevented direct social contacts and traditional cultural experiences, the masses flocked online to satisfy their deep social and cultural human needs with virtual experiences. Consequently, online representations of and connections with physical and intangible heritage have risen in importance and are creating new cultural spheres (Hunter, 2021). They also represent important efforts to enable the localglobal nexus. In this sense, technology-based social reality is another facet of smart tourism that builds on AI and robotics capabilities and requires further exploration. AI and robotics have become critical topics in our social discourse and essential enablers in our everyday life (e.g., Devlin, 2018; Tegmark, 2017). They warrant specific attention in the THL context, which not only represents an increasingly dominant and valued aspect of our lives but also a growing mix of industries with enormous economic and social impacts. Indeed, activities in the THL domain are increasingly reliant upon technologies that can understand, anticipate, and act upon human needs to improve the personal experience and wellbeing and heighten operational effectiveness (Gretzel, 2021). Intelligent services using AI enable predictions and accuracy of key tasks and allow individuals, organizations, and governance agencies to respond more flexibly to major situational changes. In a world that faces ever more complex and simultaneous crisis events, such opportunities matter, and they must expand beyond work and beyond local contexts. Here, the THL domain * Chulmo Koo [email protected]