Publication Details
Abstract
Uzbekistan received 10.3 million foreign visitors in the first nine months of 2026, 20.4% more than a year earlier, and earned USD 5.3 billion from tourism service exports, up 51.2% on the comparable period of 2025. Growth of this speed is good news, but it is also a warning: the country's service infrastructure is being asked to absorb volumes it was never built for. This article asks a practical question — how should artificial intelligence (AI) be introduced into the tourism sector so that quality keeps pace with quantity? Drawing on the service quality literature and on recent work concerning AI acceptance in hospitality, we propose a four-stage adoption model: digitalisation, a data ecosystem with predictive analytics, intelligent customer engagement, and finally an autonomous city-level tourism ecosystem. We then show, using Samarkand as a case, how the classic SERVQUAL-AHP weighting scheme can be merged with AI-driven sentiment monitoring so that the Gap 1 misalignment between what managers believe customers want and what customers actually say is tracked daily rather than once a year. Benchmarking against Dubai, Singapore, and Spain suggests the model is realistic provided staff training begins before, not after, deployment. Under a conservative reading, properly phased AI adoption could lift service quality indicators by a quarter to a third and protect export growth as the market approaches saturation in proximate source countries.