This special issue includes papers from the regular submissions to the Q&Q journal and a selection of papers presented at the: “IV International Conference on Tourism Dynamics and Trends” (ICTDT 2019) hosted by the University of Unitelma Sapienza (Rome, 22nd – 24th October 2019) and co-organized by the University of Seville (Spain), the Akdeniz University (Turkey), the Sannio University (Italy), the University of Swansea (UK). The Conference has been organized to offer an overview of new frontiers of digital transformation in tourism and hospitality, focusing on methods, models and measurements used in various ambit of application.

The Conference was open to scholars from various disciplines, professionals, and development policy managers dealing with tourism to make it as informative and productive as possible. In the Conference, experts and scholars shared their perspectives on the latest developments and trends in tourism, travel, and hospitality research. This special issue contains 14 papers, selected after double-blind peer reviews, that apply methods, models and measurements to address the issue of the impact of digital transformations on economic and social developments in the hospitality and tourism sector.

Specifically, the contributions of Alvarez Garcia et al., De Maio et al., Lo Presti and Maggiore and Demir et al. deal with mobile applications and data from social media for tourism management and tourist decision-process. Alvarez Garcia et al. investigates Big Data within the area of tourism research indexed in the WoS and Scopus databases. From the analysis of the 113 articles selected, the authors concluded that Big Data in tourism research is a new field of knowledge, which has aroused great interest since 2017. Violi et al. present the advantage of a new Smart Tourism System called SMARTCAL. Lo Presti and Maggiore study online reviews on platforms for restaurant reviews and measure the relationship between vulnerability factors, customer engagement, the adoption of information and purchase intention. Demir et al. propose a tool for market segmentation in social media to understand customers’ attitudes.

Other authors debate the role of transportation from the sustainability perspective (Tuser and Hoskova-Maierova, 2020) and consider transportation a key factor in the development and functioning of international tourism (Antolini). Filipiak et al., instead, reflect on the impact of digitization on the tourism sector and the relationship between the development of the tourism sector and sustainability factors.

The economic-financial performance is another important topic not always investigated in the hospitality industry. Pavone et al. investigate the financial statements of 5473 hotels from 2009 to 2018 after the international economic crisis to show the impact of the crisis on Italian hotels’ profitability.

In consideration of digital transformation, Avvisati et al. analyze the importance of temporary outreach events and illustrate the experience of Open Day at the Italian Institute of Geophysical and Volcanological Research (INGV) based in Rome. The online information and dedicated apps for each tour could be used to improve the customer experience.

The other papers deal with the use of computer algorithms for data processing in different fields including the tourism sector (Cruz Rambaud et al.), the use of quantitative methods to support the decision (Fattoruso and Olivieri, Forlicz et al., Bakare et al., Tušer et al.)

We are convinced that an interdisciplinary approach is the most effective way to comprehend and manage tourism’s complicated system. After our efforts as guest editors, we would like to thank the authors for submitting their papers, as well as the reviewers who, with their meticulous reviews, made this Special Issue possible. We are grateful to the Quality and Quantity Journal for allowing us to publish this special issue. We hope that you enjoy this special issue as much as we enjoyed working on this project.