Digital adoption and its impact on tourism arrivals and receipts

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of digital adoption on international tourism arrivals and receipts. In recent years, several researchers have investigated the effect of information and communication technology (ICT) on tourism arrivals and receipts (for a review, see Adeola & Evans, 2019, 2020; Kumar & Kumar, 2020). They often find that ICT indicators (e.g., Internet users) have a positive and significant impact on tourism sector because ICT improves communication, increases payment efficiency, improves tourists’ experience, and supports decision making by making quality information available in a timely manner (e.g., Adeola & Evans, 2019; Law et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2018). Although there are several studies on the link between ICT and inbound tourism, the empirical research on the role of digital adoption on inbound tourism has received limited attention, especially across a large sample of countries over time. We utilize the “Digital Adoption Index” or digital dividends from the World Bank (2016a) to provide some new insights on the link between digital adoption and tourist arrivals and receipts. The Digital Adoption Index has two main advantages. Firstly, it reflects the amount of digital technologies being offered, and adopted, by all the key agents in an economy. Consequently, it delivers a more inclusive picture of technology dispersion than the current set of indices. Secondly, the index has been created using data on coverage and usage from the World Bank’s internal databases; hence, it is likely to be more robust than those studies based on perception surveys (World Bank, 2016b).