Digital twins in tourism: a systematic literature review

Duarte Sampaio de Almeida; Fernando Brito e Abreu; In\^es Boavida-Portugal

REVIEW 3 major objections 3 minor 1 cited by

Digital twins in tourism: a systematic literature review

T0 review · 3 major / 3 minor · reviewed 2026-08-10 · deepseek-v4-flash

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Pith's one-line read Tourism's digital twins are young, heritage-focused, and often one-way, a systematic review of 34 studies finds.

desk verdict Useful first systematic map of digital twins in tourism, but the bibliometric tabulation has fixable errors and the search-string limitation means 'early stage' describes the term, not necessarily the underlying ideas. read the letter →

arxiv 2502.00002 v1 pith:4HL4XZJE submitted 2025-01-03 cs.CY cs.DL

Duarte Sampaio de Almeida , Fernando Brito e Abreu , Inês Boavida-Portugal This is my paper · ORCID

classification cs.CYcs.DL

keywords digitaltwintourismsystematicliteraturereviewculturalheritagedestinationmanagementdatalinkagesmartvirtual

verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

This paper asks how far digital twin technology has spread into tourism and answers with a systematic review of 34 peer-reviewed studies. It finds the field is at an early, evolving stage: the oldest study dates to 2021, cultural heritage dominates, destination management is the leading purpose, and most twins operate at site or local scale. A central observation is that half the reviewed systems move data only from the physical world to the digital model, so they do not meet the usually accepted requirement of a bilateral twin link. The review also finds more applied prototypes than theoretical frameworks, suggesting the technology is moving into practice faster than its conceptual foundations. If right, this gives researchers and destination managers a map of where digital twinning in tourism stands and where the gaps are.

What carries the argument

The carrier of the argument is a seven-criterion classification taxonomy—tourism type, purpose, spatial scale, data sources, data linkage, visualization, and application—applied to each reviewed study. Within that taxonomy, the data-linkage criterion (unilateral versus bilateral) does the decisive work: it is the criterion that separates 'digital representation' from a twin in the strong sense, and it drives the paper's main gap claim. The taxonomy turns a set of heterogeneous case studies into comparable categories that support the bibliometric and thematic findings.

What would settle it

A replication with a broader search—adding terms such as 'metaverse', 'virtual tourism', 'heritage information modeling', 'smart destination', and grey literature—would settle the claim. If that search uncovered tourism twin studies before 2021, or found a majority of systems with automatic digital-to-physical control, the paper's central picture of an early, mostly unilateral field would not hold.

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Extended reading notes

Core claim

The paper's central claim is that the state of the art in tourism digital twinning is immature and uneven. Most of the 34 studies concern cultural tourism, especially digitising heritage buildings, monuments, and archaeological sites, and their main purpose is destination management. Spatially, most systems represent individual sites or localities, and the most common data sources are 3D scanning and GIS data. The decisive finding is about connectivity: in half the studies the data linkage is unilateral, and in many of the studies classified as bilateral the digital-to-physical path is indirect, so the physical counterpart changes only when people act on the twin's output rather than through automated synchronisation. The review interprets this as a mismatch with mainstream DT definitions and identifies fuller bilateral linkage, dynamic data sources, and larger spatial scales as the main open directions.

Load-bearing premise

The review's completeness rests on the assumption that searching three databases for the literal terms 'digital twin' and 'touris*' in title, abstract, and keywords captures all relevant studies; relevant work described as 'virtual tourism', 'smart heritage metaverse', or 'city digital replica' without those exact terms would be missed and could change the reported gaps, a limitation the authors acknowledge in Section 5.3.4.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

If the field is as young as the review suggests, the absence of studies before 2021 means there is no established baseline or best-practice pattern yet for tourism twins.
Because many tourism twins are unilateral, a reader should expect that systems labelled 'digital twins' in tourism often function as monitoring or visualisation tools, not closed-loop control systems.
The concentration on cultural heritage and site-level twins means the main near-term gains are likely in heritage preservation and site management, not in city-wide or national tourism governance.
The review's gap list points to concrete next steps: add dynamic data sources such as sensors, user-generated content, and web mining, and build bilateral digital-to-physical feedback for predicting crowding and service quality.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

Editorial inference: the unilateral/bilateral split could be used as a maturity ladder for tourism twins, letting future studies grade systems by whether the digital-to-physical path is passive, advisory, or automatic.
Editorial inference: if bilateral, data-rich tourism twins become common, data governance and tourist privacy will become central design constraints rather than side issues; the review mentions governance only through one included framework.
Editorial inference: the one-way representation of heritage sites may also be a sampling artifact of funding and scanning costs rather than a stable property of the domain; cheaper reality capture could change the pattern quickly.

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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, and a circularity audit.

Desk Editor's Note

read the letter

Worth a look if you work on tourism informatics or on digital twins outside manufacturing. It is the first SLR specifically on digital twins in tourism, and that alone earns it a read. The authors are transparent about their search and selection process, and their taxonomy (tourism type, purpose, spatial scale, data sources, data linkage, visualization, application) is a serviceable frame for grouping 34 studies. The main descriptive findings -- work starts around 2021, cultural heritage dominates, most systems are site-level, and half of the papers describe only unilateral physical-to-digital data flow -- are direct observations from the corpus and hold up. The summary table classifying each study is a useful artifact.

The soft spots are real but not fatal. The bibliometric figures contain clear data-integrity errors: Italy is split into 'Italia' and 'Italy' in Figure 5, which inflates its count; 'UCG' and 'UGC' both appear in Figure 9, double-counting user-generated content; and 'Traffic data' shows up in Figure 9 without being defined in the taxonomy. These need correction before anyone trusts the specific counts. The larger limitation is the search string itself: requiring the literal phrase 'digital twin' plus 'touris*' excludes papers that describe functionally equivalent systems as 'virtual tourism platforms' or 'smart heritage metaverse'. The authors acknowledge this in Section 5.3.4, but they don't estimate how many studies are missed or whether the 'extensive research gap' conclusion would survive a broader search. That caveat is worth stating as a boundary on the claims, though it is not disqualifying—the review's scope is the term as used, and the method is otherwise solid.

The circularity concern is minor. The taxonomy is derived from the corpus, but the headline findings (recent origin, cultural tourism focus, unilateral linkage) stand apart from the taxonomy and would survive even if the classification categories changed.

Who gets value? Researchers wanting a structured entry point into digital twin work in tourism, and destination managers looking for a landscape of what has been tried. It is a mapping, not a technical breakthrough. That is fine. I would send it to a serious referee, with a request to fix the data errors and add a paragraph on the synonym-search sensitivity. My own verdict would be conditional acceptance for those revisions.

Referee Report

3 major / 3 minor

Summary. This paper conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) with bibliometric analysis to characterize the state of the art of digital twin technology in tourism. Using a search for the literal strings 'digital twin' and 'touris*' in three databases, the authors select 34 peer-reviewed studies and classify them along a taxonomy of tourism type, purpose, spatial scale, data sources, data linkage, visualization, and application. The reported findings are that the field is nascent (oldest study from 2021), that cultural tourism and heritage digitalization dominate, that destination management is the primary purpose, that spatial scales are mostly site-level, that data linkage is often unilateral, and that there is a large research gap.

Significance. If the findings are robust, this SLR offers a useful and timely mapping of an emerging interdisciplinary area, identifies concrete research gaps, and provides a reproducible classification scheme. The paper is transparent in its PRISMA-based methodology and includes an explicit validity-threat discussion. However, the significance is conditional on the adequacy of the search scope—since functionally equivalent systems described with other terms may be missed—and on the correction of several data tabulation errors that currently undermine confidence in the bibliometric results.

major comments (3)

[Section 4.4 and Section 5.3.4] The search string requires the literal phrase 'digital twin' together with 'touris*' in the title, abstract, or keywords. This excludes studies describing functionally equivalent systems with alternative terminology, such as 'virtual replica', 'digital shadow', or 'smart heritage metaverse', even when they satisfy inclusion criterion IC3. The authors acknowledge this as a construct validity threat in Section 5.3.4, but they do not quantify its impact or provide a sensitivity analysis. Because the central claims of RQ1 ('early stage', oldest study 2021, only 34 studies) and RQ3 ('extensive research gap') are directly based on the size and composition of the corpus, the conclusions may reflect the query string rather than the actual state of the field. I recommend either broadening the search to include commonly used synonyms or performing a sensitivity analysis to demonstrate that the main findings are robust to terminological variation.
[Section 5.2.1 and Figure 5] The country frequency chart in Figure 5 lists 'Italia' and 'Italy' as separate entries with counts of 2 and 3 respectively, while the prose in Section 5.2.1 states that the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are the second most contributing countries with N=4 each. If the Italian entries are combined (total 5), Italy would be second, contradicting the text. This data integrity error should be corrected, and the corresponding prose and figure should be reconciled.
[Section 5.2.4 and Figure 9] The data source frequency chart in Figure 9 lists both 'UCG' and 'UGC' as separate categories, with counts of 1 and 3 respectively. The taxonomy in Section 4.7.5 uses the abbreviation 'UGC' for user-generated data, and the text in Section 5.2.4 states that only N=3 studies use this source. The duplicate label appears to misrepresent the same category and leads to an inconsistent count. Please harmonize the labels and ensure the figure matches the text and taxonomy.

minor comments (3)

[Section 5.3.1] The text states that the related studies 'start in 2020', whereas the abstract and Figure 3 indicate that the oldest study is from 2021. This inconsistency should be resolved.
[Section 4.7.5 and Figure 9] The abbreviation for user-generated data is inconsistently written as 'UCG' instead of 'UGC' in several places, including the taxonomy description and Figure 9. Please correct the abbreviation throughout.
[Figure 3] The stacked bar chart for publication year and venue type is difficult to read because the segment values are not clearly labelled. Adding a legend or explicit numeric labels for each segment would improve clarity.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged · score 0.0 of 10

No significant circularity: the review's findings are descriptive tabulations of the explicitly defined 34-study corpus, not predictions derived from fitted inputs; the acknowledged database-coverage limitation is a validity threat, not circular reasoning.

full rationale

The paper's claims are descriptive summaries of the selected corpus rather than model-derived predictions. The taxonomy in Section 4.7 is induced from the same studies ('The possible values for each criterion were obtained from study analysis'), but the reported frequencies, such as 23 cultural-tourism studies, 25 destination-management purposes, and 17 unilateral versus 17 bilateral linkages, are direct tabulations of the classified studies; none of these numbers is forced by the definition of a category. The 'early stage / research gap' conclusions follow from the small number of records that survived PRISMA screening and from the observation that the oldest matched study is from 2021; this is an empirical feature of the searched literature, not an equation that makes the conclusion true by construction. The search strings are the eligibility criteria, and the paper explicitly acknowledges in Section 5.3.4 that 'The reliance on three scientific databases (Scopus, Web of Science, and Dimensions) may exclude relevant studies not indexed in these repositories,' which is a construct-validity limitation, not a circular step. The only self-citation identified, Brito e Abreu et al. (2024), appears in the Introduction as an example of existing smart-tourism tools and is not load-bearing for any conclusion. No parameter is fitted, no prediction is generated from a model, and no uniqueness theorem or ansatz is imported from prior work by the same authors. Consequently, no specific circular reduction can be exhibited, and the appropriate finding is no significant circularity.

Assumptions & free parameters 0 free parameters · 2 assumptions · 0 invented entities

The review has no free parameters or invented entities. It rests on search coverage, the peer-review status of sources, and the definitional lens that a true DT requires bilateral linkage. The taxonomy categories are qualitative labels derived from the corpus, not fitted parameters.

assumptions (2)

domain assumption The selected databases (Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions) and search strings identify all or most relevant literature on digital twins in tourism.
Needed for the claim that the topic is at an early stage and that a research gap exists; acknowledged as a construct validity threat in Section 5.3.4.
domain assumption A 'true' digital twin requires bilateral physical-to-digital and digital-to-physical data linkage, following van der Valk et al. (2022).
Used in Section 5.2.5 to categorize studies as unilateral or bilateral and to conclude that many tourism DTs are incomplete twins.

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Cite this review

Pith. "Pith review of Digital twins in tourism: a systematic literature review." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/4HL4XZJE

@misc{pith2026250200002,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: Digital twins in tourism: a systematic literature review},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/4HL4XZJE}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:2502.00002}
}

read the original abstract

Purpose: This systematic literature review (SLR) characterizes the current state of the art on digital twinning (DT) technology in tourism-related applications. We aim to evaluate the types of DTs described in the literature, identifying their purposes, the areas of tourism where they have been proposed, their main components, and possible future directions based on current work. Design/methodology/approach: We conducted this SLR with bibliometric analysis based on an existing, validated methodology. Thirty-four peer-reviewed studies from three major scientific databases were selected for review. They were categorized using a taxonomy that included tourism type, purpose, spatial scale, data sources, data linkage, visualization, and application. Findings: The topic is at an early, evolving stage, as the oldest study found dates back to 2021. Most reviewed studies deal with cultural tourism, focusing on digitising cultural heritage. Destination management is the primary purpose of these DTs, with mainly site-level spatial scales. In many studies, the physical-digital data linkage is unilateral, lacking twin synchronization. In most DTs considered bilateral, the linkage is indirect. There are more applied than theoretical studies, suggesting progress in applying DTs in the field. Finally, there is an extensive research gap regarding DT technology in tourism, which is worth filling. Originality/Value: This paper presents a novel SLR with a bibliometric analysis of DTs' applied and theoretical application in tourism. Each reviewed publication is assessed and characterized, identifying the current state of the topic, possible research gaps, and future directions.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2502.00002 by the authors.

**Figure 2.** PRISMA Flow Diagram of the study selection process (Source: Authors own work) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p008_2.png] view at source ↗

**Figure 3.** Number of publications by year, subdivided by venue (Source: Authors own work) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p012_3.png] view at source ↗

Figures from the paper (9 more)

**Figure 4.** Figure 4: Continent distribution histogram (Source: Authors own work) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p013_4.png]

**Figure 5.** Figure 5: Country frequency (Source: Authors own work) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_5.png]

**Figure 6.** Figure 6: Frequency of tourism type categorizations in studies (Source: Authors own work) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p016_6.png]

**Figure 7.** Figure 7: Frequency of purpose categorizations in studies (Source: Authors own work) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p017_7.png]

**Figure 8.** Figure 8: Frequency of spatial scale categorizations in studies (Source: Authors own work) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p018_8.png]

**Figure 9.** Figure 9: Frequency of data source categorizations in studies (Source: Authors own work) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p020_9.png]

**Figure 10.** Figure 10: Frequency of data linkage categorization in studies (Source: Authors own work) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p021_10.png]

**Figure 11.** Figure 11: Frequency of visualization categorization in studies (Source: Authors own work) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p022_11.png]

**Figure 12.** Figure 12: Frequency of studies per application dimension (Source: Authors own work) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p023_12.png]

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

Digital Twins for Extended Reality Tourism: User Experience Evaluation Across User Groups
cs.HC 2025-09 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

An exploratory evaluation of AR and VR digital-twin tourism apps finds generally positive enjoyment and low workload, with VR usability and cybersickness issues and user characteristics correlating with ratings.

Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

9 extracted references · 9 canonical work pages · cited by 1 Pith paper

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Pith tools

Reviewed August 10, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.

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URL: https://www.aia-aerospace.org/wp-content/uploads/Digital-Twin-Institute-Position-Paper-December-2020-1.pdf B

AIAA Digital Engineering Integration Committee (2020), Digital Twin: Definition & Value – An AIAA and AIA Position Paper, Technical report, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) & Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), Reston, VA, USA. URL: https://www.aia-aerospace.org/wp-content/uploads/Digital-Twin-Institute-Position-Paper-December...

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Sang, F., Wu, H., Liu, Z. and Fang, S. (2022), Digital Twin Platform Design for Zhejiang Rural Cultural Tourism Based on Unreal Engine,in ‘Proc. of the International Conference on Culture-Oriented Science and Technology (CoST)’, pp. 274–278. Semeraro, C., Lezoche, M., Panetto, H. and Dassisti, M. (2021), ‘Digital twin paradigm: A systematic literature rev...

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and Zwitter, A

Rahmadian, E., Feitosa, D. and Zwitter, A. (2023), Governing Digital Twin technology for smart and sustainable tourism: a case study in applying a documentation framework for architecture decisions,inA. Zwitter and O. J. Gstrein, eds, ‘Handbook 30 on the Politics and Governance of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence’, Edward Elgar Publishing, chapter 4, ...

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Hu, W., Zhang, T., Deng, X., Liu, Z. and Tan, J. (2021), ‘Digital twin: a state-of-the-art review of its enabling technologies, applications and challenges’,Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing and Special Equipment2(1), 1–34. Huang, Y. (2024), ‘Inheritance and Innovation: A Study on the Path of Ancient Village Cultural Tourism Planning and Design’, Inter...

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Guzzetti, F., Anyabolu, K. L. N., Biolo, F. and Dell’Orto, R. (2022), ‘BIM and Castello Sforzesco in Milan. A particular approach to digitization of the architectural and information heritage’,The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information SciencesXL VI-5/W1-2022, 115–122. Haag, S. and Anderl, R. (2019), ‘Automate...

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Gallist, N. and Hagler, J. (2023), Tourism in the Metaverse: Digital Twin of a City in the Alps, in ‘Proc. of the 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM)’, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, p. 568–570. Galvão, A., e Abreu, F. B. and de Melo, J. J. (2024), Towards a Consensual Definition for Smart Touri...

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