This study makes a significant effort to carefully assess the corpus of existing tourism literature to highlight the potential opportunities and challenges proposed by different authors in the parlance of digital technology in the tourism and hospitality sector. The basis of this research paper is a critical discourse analysis of the literature on digital technology in the travel and hospitality sector. A thorough study of the literature was conducted on publications based on the keywords of digital technology viz a viz tourist and hospitality, using the tool ‘Bibliometrix’ and its web interface ‘Biblioshiny’ developed using R programming language. The selected papers were retrieved using the most significant scientific database, such as Scopus, from which bibliometric data for 528 publications was extracted and published on the content of digital technology in the tourist and hospitality sector; publications between 2002 and 2022 were considered. The analysis revealed that digital technology is increasingly becoming necessary for each of the stakeholders in the tourism industry, including tourist entrepreneurs, hoteliers, and destination management organizations. It was also found that those who are not upgrading to the smart and digital tourism platforms continue to lose customers over time. This analysis shows that since 2017, the amount of literature on digital technology and the tourism industry has increased significantly, with more than 74 articles in 2019 and almost 124 in 2021 alone. Booyens and Hijalagar emerged as the most well-known authors, the University of Johannesburg had the most articles on the subject, and Tourism Management was the most cited journal with 954 citations. Smart devices are becoming more prevalent across all tourism-related activities, providing academics, researchers, and practitioners the chance to continue the discourse on technology interventions and their effects on tourism and hospitality.