Presentation short abstract

This paper examines digitalisation as a form of top-down tourism governance. Drawing on early-stage PhD research in five Spanish cities and using Barcelona as an illustrative example, it analyses how AI-enabled hospitality systems reproduce power asymmetries and shape “green” tourism narratives.

Presentation long abstract

Digitalisation has become a key instrument through which tourism destinations pursue “green”, “smart”, and “inclusive” growth. This paper conceptualises AI-enabled hospitality services as political technologies that reorganise power and govern tourism from above. Drawing on early-stage doctoral research comparing five Spanish cities undergoing digital transitions, the paper analyses how digital infrastructures and AI-driven sustainability tools generate new hierarchies within the hospitality sector.

Large hotel chains possess the financial resources, technical expertise, and institutional networks necessary to integrate AI for energy optimisation, sustainability reporting, and guest management. Their technological capacity enables close alignment with smart and green tourism discourses and allows them to shape emerging governance frameworks. In contrast, SME hotels face structural barriers—economic, technical, and organisational—that constrain their ability to participate in digital transitions. As a result, digitalisation becomes a distinct axis of inequality, determining who can access sustainability programmes, gain visibility, or influence policy priorities.

Barcelona serves as an illustrative case, where smart tourism strategies and intensified touristification have made AI-based governance tools particularly influential in shaping urban tourism futures. While such interventions are promoted as solutions to overcrowding and environmental pressure, they also reinforce uneven relations of power by privileging actors already embedded within dominant technological and institutional arrangements.

By framing digitalisation as governance-from-above, the paper contributes to growth-critical political ecology debates. It highlights how technological transitions may reproduce or deepen uneven sustainability transitions and offers a conceptual framework for understanding AI-enabled hospitality as a site where power, knowledge, and environmental governance intersect.