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.

How a Tourism City Responds to COVID-19: A CEE Perspective (Kraków Case Study)

“…Will postpandemic tourism cities become sustainable tourism destinations and thus become better places to live? As many academics expect [14][15][16], post-pandemic tourism should be more sustainable, and tourist destinations should base their development patterns on sustainable development goals. On the other hand, the practice to date, especially in urban environments, and despite many declarations, has been strongly connected with growth strategies that were strengthening urban tourism hypertrophy [115].…”

“…The COVID-19 crisis has changed tourism and the tourism industry as well as tourism research [14]. A review of the current literature on the impact of the pandemic on tourism shows that opinion papers, conceptual papers and research notes dominate, while there are only a few empirical studies [7,15,16]. Most of the papers published investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on tourism on a global scale [16,17].…”

“…A review of the current literature on the impact of the pandemic on tourism shows that opinion papers, conceptual papers and research notes dominate, while there are only a few empirical studies [7,15,16]. Most of the papers published investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on tourism on a global scale [16,17]. Among the different research approaches, the most common are those reporting the impacts of COVID-19 and discussing the resumption of activities during and after the pandemic [17].…”

Sustainable Determinants That Affect Tourist Arrival Forecasting

“…The supported data vector contains MIC, but the period is shortened due to the lack of data for MIC. Therefore, the supported data vector, which is analysed in the separate section, is in (3): (3) where the abbreviation VIR stands for viruses and BAC for bacteria.…”

“…Since late 2019, tourism has experienced a crisis [2], and the vast majority of researchers [3] have been concerned with the idea of what tourism will look like after the Covid-19 pandemic [4]. It is foreseeable that the solipsism of everyday impact on the environment will be crucial for future tourism demand and, more importantly, for the supply [5].…”