Digital transformation in tourism: a bibliometric analysis of scientific production, 2021-2026

Purpose. To analyse the trends, intellectual structure and thematic foci of scientific production on digital transformation in tourism between 2021 and 2026. Methodology. A quantitative, descriptive and analytical study based on bibliometric analysis. The corpus was retrieved from Dimensions.ai using the query “digital transformation” combined with the descriptors business, management and tourism, restricted to open access articles published between 2021 and 2026, and processed with the R package bibliometrix through the biblioshiny interface, the final corpus comprised 145 documents, 441 authors and 115 sources. Main finding. The field shows an annual growth rate of 32.77 % and an average of 30.06 citations per document, with highly dispersed authorship (99.55 % of authors with a single document), scarce international collaboration (2.76 %) and editorial concentration in regional open access journals from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, co-word analysis identified six thematic foci, structured around tourism, digitalisation and innovation. Conclusion. Digital transformation in tourism is an emerging research front, thematically cohesive yet structurally fragmented, with a marked gap in Latin American empirical evidence. Value. The study provides the first integrated overview of production, collaboration, impact and conceptual structure for this thematic and temporal scope, and explicitly positions the Latin American contribution within the global landscape.