Tourism industry at times of crisis: a bibliometric approach and research agenda

Abstract

Purpose

The COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented global turmoil and a halt on international tourism. This study aims to evaluate the scientific literature about tourism crisis and disasters and depicts how this research stream evolved in the face of economic, security, health, environmental or trust crises, further providing insights about a research agenda on this stream.

Design/methodology/approach

This study uses bibliometric methods and topic models, specifically latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) methods to evaluate the nature and course of the tourism crises and disasters scientific literature. Data from 2,810 documents were retrieved from the Web of Science database and were used to perform the analysis.

Findings

The results show an increase of tourism crises and disasters scientific literature departing from 2010, and a surge in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, themes such as tourism competitiveness, tourism demand, crisis management, perceived risk, natural disasters and destination recovery are among the most relevant themes in the research line, showing that the effect of economic and financial crises on tourism industry, sustainable tourism and tourism demand are set to be among the most relevant in the upcoming years.

Research limitations/implications

This study fills a void in the tourism literature by providing a roadmap to understand the past, present and future of the tourism crises and disasters research line and the avenues for future research in this field, including methods, in the period post-COVID-19.

Originality/value

Previous studies on tourism crises and disasters were focused on literature review and on the relationship between crises and disasters and the tourism industry. This study uses a set of methods unused before in the research stream, namely, a combination of bibliometric methods and LDA methods, to provide a road map for the present state-of-the-art of tourism crises and disasters research and promising future research lines.

Citation

Sampaio, C., Farinha, L., Sebastião, J.R. and Fernandes, A. (2023), "Tourism industry at times of crisis: a bibliometric approach and research agenda", Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Insights, Vol. 6 No. 4, pp. 1464-1484. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHTI-08-2021-0223