The impact of a global crisis on areas and topics of tourism research

Abstract

Tourism research has placed considerable emphasis on the pandemic and its impact, which is not surprising given the impact of the pandemic on tourism. However, what specifically do tourism scholars write about the pandemic and its consequences for tourism? What new insights does the literature on COVID-19 provide to guide our practice in sustainable tourism? The pandemic can be seen as a sustainability challenge. Dealing with the pandemic and other sustainability challenges like climate change will not require exactly the same remedies, but the same kind, building resilience, adaptivity, flexibility, collaboration, and co-creation. We thus argue that the literature on tourism and the pandemic may function as a “thermometer” of the way scholars view sustainability and tourism, and that exploring this literature gives us a space to reconsider our understanding of sustainable tourism. Therefore, we have conducted a literature review of the COVID-19 literature on tourism in 2020. A total of 87 articles, in 17 journals, from 4 databases were analyzed to explore how current scholars perceive COVID-19 and tourism, in light of sustainability perspectives. As a result, through the content analysis, this study has found six leading themes in COVID-19 and tourism and has provided valuable information with descriptive statistical analysis for its distributions by theory, methodology, and study area.