The Importance of City Logistics for Urban Tourism Development: Searching for a New Research Field

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a study on city logistics in the urban tourist area as a research field. Both disciplines are developing intensively, and the research results have many implications for business practices, in particular for alternative fuel for transport, energy savings, waste management, and creating new business models that meet the challenges of modern society. In the era of decarbonisation, city logistics and tourism must define new rules for coexistence. The identified dominant subfields (tourism, logistics, urban transport, urban development and planning, new technologies, and sustainable development) and the links between them have pointed to some research gaps and suggested a direction for further research. The research procedure applied, adapted to the overall goal of the study, consists of an analysis of publications in the Scopus database (February 2022). A keyword co-occurrence network for the research field of city logistics in the urban tourist area is constructed with the use of the VOSviewer software. It follows from the analysis that the research area combining city logistics and city tourism remains relatively unexplored. Forming only a small part of research into city logistics, it has unexplored research potential. The research area under analysis is interdisciplinary in nature.