Rural tourism influences rural communities, yet its growth often leads to substantial land use changes, creating both opportunities and tensions. Despite this, a comprehensive overview of the literature examining their intersection is absent. To address this gap, this study employed a bibliometric analysis of 497 documents from the Web of Science database spanning 1994 to 2025. Methods included major publication trend analysis, keyword co-occurrence analysis, and co-citation analysis to uncover publication trends, dominant themes, and intellectual structure. Results indicate a rapidly expanding, interdisciplinary field characterized by strong international collaboration and a focus on sustainability, environmental planning, and integrated land management. Key thematic clusters include geospatial tools, environmental stewardship, urbanization impacts, social dimensions, and economic assessment of rural landscapes. The intellectual foundations are rooted in spatial planning, ecosystem services, socio-economic impacts, and ecotourism’s conservation goals. Gaps identified include lack of synthesis studies, underrepresentation of qualitative methods, insufficient policy-implementation research, and underrepresentation of European and intra-Global South collaborations. The study calls for future works to address these gaps through interdisciplinary approaches, longitudinal monitoring, and expanded regional collaborations. By mapping the field’s evolution, this study provides a foundational reference for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to balance tourism development with sustainable land use in rural areas.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is reshaping the landscape of the tourism industry, presenting both unprecedented opportunities and complex challenges. This study explores the prospects and challenges posed by 4IR for tourism through a literature review. The objective is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between technological advancements and the tourism sector. Employing a rigorous methodology, peer-reviewed academic articles, conference papers, and relevant book chapters were analyzed, focusing on key technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, robotics, and big data. The results highlight promising prospects, including enhanced customer experience, smart destinations, augmented and virtual reality, data-driven decision making, sustainable tourism practices and increased efficiency and productivity alongside challenges like data security and privacy concerns, digital divide, job displacement, overreliance on technology, ethical considerations and infrastructure and investment. The paper's key contribution lies in it’s provision of categorical perspective of the various impacts of 4IR on tourism. Also, the study provides valuable insights for stakeholders, policymakers, and industry players to navigate the transformative era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the tourism sector. Moreover, the study identified gaps in existing literature and provides direction for future works.

Formal urban land is market unable to supply adequate residential plot that could shoulder the prevailing demand from low- and middle-income people and hence, the aim of the paper was meant to explore the informal land buyers’ expectations of infrastructure and various related municipal services that they deprive themselves of. A mixed-method approach was used, combining a survey of 186 respondents in informal land markets, observation, and focus group discussions with municipal experts. Secondary data from formal land markets in Dilla municipality from 2017-2023 were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The result of the study revealed that the pushing factors of informal land market proliferation in Dilla city is due to the lack of formal land supply from Dilla municipality which is only 6.6% so that the remaining great majority (97.3%) of the study area residents expect at least one service (road, water, electricity, drainage, monitoring services) from Dilla municipality to improve deprivation of basic infrastructural services, notwithstanding the need of land monitoring services such as surveying and title deeds. The situations call for design a pro-poor land and housing policy, adequate compensation during expropriation of farmers for serviced supply of land, creating awareness about formal land markets, and working in collaboration with rural counterparts in basis of rural – urban collaboration frameworks.