Through citespace visualization and quantification methods, the analysis of academic research trends in the field of tourism under the COVID-19 situation can analyze the research hotspots in this field, grasp research trends, gain insight into research gaps, and provide ideas for subsequent researchers. This study collects 828 publications about tourism research under the context of COVID-19 from Web of Science Core Collection by topic searching, which use "tourism" AND "COVID-19" as the search terms. Citespace is used for visual exploration of the collected literature since it is more objective and reliable, and the presentation of visual atlas is also more concrete and intuitive. The result indicates that at present, a core author group has not been formed in this research field, most researchers are in the state of independent research. The cooperation between scholars, institutions and countries needs to be strengthened as the density of cooperative network connections is very low. China started research earlier and has various achievements in this field, but the research depth needs to be improved. Existing research hotspots mainly focus on exploring the impact of COVID-19 on the tourism industry, crisis management, satisfaction. In the future, more attention should be paid to "sustainable tourism" and "tourism innovation". Future research could consider expanding the scope of literature sources and incorporating keyword burst analysis.