Abstract

     The importance of the risk to tourism and hospitality operations from pandemic-related crises has increased. Therefore, the current study offers a literature review targeting tourism and hospitality stakeholders’ perceptions of past diseases and has three objectives: (1) Explore major topics from previous research on infectious diseases using topic modeling; (2) compare non-COVID-19 and COVID-19 crises; (3) investigate research topics in the tourism and hospitality industries. To meet our research objectives, we reviewed published pandemic-related articles in the tourism and hospitality literature since the year 2000. Based on the results, we first identified nine key topics related to infectious diseases (i.e., policy, human resources, branding, resilience, technology, global or community change, risk perception, disease impact, and lifestyle). Second, we suggest the application of different topic weights in non-COVID-19 and COVID-19 research. Third, we found that it is appropriate to apply different topic weights in tourism and hospitality research.

Introduction

     For some decades, the tourism and hospitality industries have been sensitive to and affected by external and internal factors, such as uncertainty, challenges, crises, and pandemics. An unexpected crisis (e.g., natural, financial, and health) can threaten tourism demand and harm the performance of hospitality-related companies. Chief among these may be pandemics and disease outbreaks that play significant roles in social and economic change. Compared with other industries, tourism and hospitality are particularly vulnerable to disasters and crises (Chen et al., 2021, Chen et al., 2021), with the tourism sector acknowledged as being one of the most easily affected by crises, disasters, and pandemics (Gössling et al., 2020, Yu et al., 2020).

     Previous studies have concentrated on crisis-related research within hospitality and tourism context (Zenker and Kock, 2020). Most of these studies investigated crisis impacts and recoveries, with a focus on risk perception in the tourism industry (Bulin and Tenie, 2020, da Silva Lopes et al., 2021). In the tourism and hospitality contexts, existing studies have focused on disaster, crisis, and risk perception/impact/management/communication/recovery over the past decade (Bulin and Tenie, 2020, Wut et al., 2021). Health-related crisis events, decision-making, perceived risk, resilience, crisis prevention and preparedness, and the role of digital media are other prominent themes (Butler, 2020). In addition, health-related crises, the role of social media type, and extending and investigating the type of crisis/disaster/risk are the most prominent trends in the literature (Wut et al., 2021).

Results

۳٫۱٫ Description of health-crisis literature

     Table 2 summarizes the inspected articles categorized by journal, disease type, and industry. More studies were found in the tourism field than in the hospitality field. The International Journal of Hospitality Management (IJHM) had the highest number of COVID-19-related publications, followed by Current Issues in Tourism (CIT) and Tourism Geographies (TG). All three of these journals launched special issues regarding COVID-19, making their prominence unsurprising. Consistent with the focuses of the journals, most articles published in the IJHM fell within the hospitality context. Tourism-based articles outnumbered hospitality-context articles in both CIT and TG.