Ethical challenges of big data in tourism
Published in Handbook on Big Data Marketing and Management in Tourism and Hospitality, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025
Abstract
Big data has become an inevitable phenomenon in the tourism sector. While offering lucrative opportunities for tourism management, big data imposes significant ethical challenges on organisations and businesses collecting and utilising this data. The lack of proper big data ethical standards in tourism has resulted in significant financial and reputational losses to many tourism organisations in the past, apart from the social, psychological, and physical threats inflicted upon individual tourists. Additionally, the role of ethics is extremely crucial in tourism due to its nature as a services and experiences industry. Overall, while this abundance of data offers many business and management opportunities, it also raises significant ethical and moral concerns that most organisations are unaware of. Therefore, this chapter aims to provide a conceptual view of big data’s ethical challenges in tourism categorised into the following themes: (1) privacy (informed consent, confidentiality); (2) data ownership (data brokers and storage); (3) data protection (security, encryption, cybersecurity, and hacking); and (4) discrimination (human bias, data bias, algorithm bias, and digital divide). This chapter aims to serve as a useful resource for understanding big data ethical challenges in tourism and provides a foundation for future tourism research in this direction.
Recommended citation: Sharma, S. (2025). Ethical challenges of big data in tourism. In Handbook on Big Data Marketing and Management in Tourism and Hospitality (pp. 232–250). Edward Elgar Publishing.
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