Tourism Crises and Impacts on Destinations: A Systematic Review of the Tourism and Hospitality Literature

Abstract

Tourism crises are important events affecting the development of destinations. However, the academic community lacks adequate knowledge from the accumulated literature on the classification attributes, spatial distribution, and impact structure of global tourism crises. This research analyzed 302 articles related to tourism crises from 1991 to 2020 drawn from the Social Sciences Citation Index database. Bibliometric and content analyses were conducted to identify the event types, regional distribution, impact structure, and synergistic factors of tourism crises. The results showed that the extant research on tourism crises has event-driven characteristics. The types of tourism crises are diverse and have multiple subcategories. The tourism crises featured in academic research are mainly events affecting Asia, Europe, and North America, reflecting their real-world distribution. The impacts of tourism crises on destinations are at three levels: macro, meso, and micro. Synergistic factors can enhance or weaken the degree of crisis impacts, which include positive, negative, and interactive factors. Research on tourism crises has substantial future scope and this investigation puts forward an agenda for this work.