tourism after pandemic

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With the decline in air travel from the pandemic, the classic road trip has become more popular in America.

Here are 8 ways travel will change after the pandemic

What will travel look like in the future? We asked the experts.

With coronavirus cases continuing to spike in America and abroad, travelers with a United States passport remain grounded. To date, just nine countries are open to Americans without restrictions. If Belarus, Serbia , Zambia or any of the other six countries on that list aren’t in the cards, then travelers itching to get on an international flight will have to wait.

How long is still unknown. Elizabeth Becker, author of Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism , notes that the pandemic “ decimated ” the $8 trillion global travel industry overnight. “Those essential pillars of 21st-century global travel—open borders, open destinations, and visa-free travel—won’t return in the short term or even medium term,” she says.

What does that mean for the future of travel? Despite the turbulence, experts are seeing blue skies. Bruce Poon Tip, author of Unlearn: The Year the Earth Stood Still and the founder of travel company G Adventures , says not only will we travel again, we’ll do it better. “I still believe travel can be the biggest distributor of wealth the world has ever seen,” he says. “This pause gives us the gift of time to consider how we can travel more consciously.”

From a renewed commitment to sustainable tourism to creative ways to globetrot from home, here’s how travel authors, bloggers, and podcasters are navigating.

( Related: These 25 destinations inspire future journeys and remind us why we love to travel .)

Sustainability will be a driving force

Tourists crowd St. ​Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy, in 2013. In the wake of the pandemic, experts predict there will be more interest in visiting less-crowded places.

One silver lining of the pandemic? Consumers are doubling down on sustainability . Becker predicts travelers will take on the role of “concerned citizens” demanding responsible travel policies. The industry will respond with active measures to prioritize a healthy world over profit margins. “Don’t be surprised if countries mandate ‘fly-free days’ and other measures to control climate change,” she says.

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Take action: Reduce your carbon footprint by purchasing offsets with companies such as Cool Effect and by staying at certified green hotels. Check sites like Book Different , which rates accommodations for eco-friendliness.

( Related: Here’s how Greece is rethinking its once bustling tourism industry .)

Our journeys will become more inclusive

The Black Lives Matter movement has brought the issue of representation to light in all industries, including travel. That’s overdue, says Sarah Greaves-Gabbadon . The award-winning journalist and TV host says she hopes the industry is moving toward meaningful change but worries that any change may be short-lived. “When the pandemic is past and the hashtags are no longer trending, will industry gatekeepers still be eager to attract, cater to, and celebrate travelers of color?” she writes in an email. “I’m cautiously optimistic but not completely convinced.”

Black Travel Alliance ’s Martinique Lewis feels the industry is moving in the right direction and remains hopeful. She notes that companies are addressing the needs of diverse customers and says it’s about time. “For the first time they are considering what a trans female goes through not only when choosing what bathroom to go in at a restaurant, but when she checks into a hotel and her license shows a different person,” says Lewis. “Now plus-size travelers wanting to surf and scuba but can’t because the lack of wetsuits in their size are being acknowledged. Now blind travelers who still want to experience tours and extreme sports while on holiday are thought of.”

Take action: Visit one of the nearly 200 living history museums in the U.S., where historic interpreters portray figures from the past. They shed light on painful issues (such as racism in America) and hidden narratives (such as those of people of color, whose stories have been suppressed).

Small communities will play a bigger role

Travelers can make a difference in small towns that were already struggling economically before the pandemic. Caz Makepeace of Y Travel Blog says she and her family have always traveled slowly to lesser-known areas, “rather than racing through destinations.” Now she’s supporting these places by patronizing local businesses and donating to nonprofits.

Kate Newman of Travel for Difference suggests travelers focus on “ global south ” or developing countries that depend on tourism. “We need to diversify our locations to avoid mass tourism and focus on the places that really need it,” she says. “Seeing so many communities suffer during COVID-19 has brought [this issue] to light.”

Take action: Turn to sustainable tourism educational and advocacy nonprofit Impact Travel Alliance to learn how to empower locals and protect the environment.

We’ll seek quality over quantity

High-mileage travelers are putting more thought into their bucket lists. “COVID-19 has allowed me to rethink how and why I travel,” says Erick Prince of The Minority Nomad . “It’s given me the freedom to explore travel projects for passion instead of the paycheck.” Rather than focusing on paid gigs, the blogger, who lives in Thailand, says he’ll be embarking on a self-funded project to highlight off-the-beaten-track provinces in his adopted country.

Eulanda Osagiede, of Hey Dip Your Toes In , is putting the breaks on international trips, citing travel as a privilege many take for granted. “Privilege comes in many forms, and the act of recognizing our travel-related ones have called us to think about traveling more intentionally and less often—if ever the world begins to look similar to its pre-pandemic days.”

Take action: Check the Transformational Travel Council for resources and recommendations on operators who can help organize meaningful journeys.

The road trip will kick into high gear

For many, road trips may be the only feasible option for travel right now, and frequent fliers like Gabby Beckford of Packs Light are revving up. Driving across state lines can be just as exciting as flying across international borders; it’s about the mindset. “Road-tripping has shown me that the core of travel—curiosity, exposure to newness, and wonder—[is] a perspective, not a destination,” she says.

Take action : Plan a coronavirus-conscious trip to Colorado, home to superlative stargazing sites —and what may become the world’s largest Dark Sky reserve.

Some high-mileage travelers say they plan to focus on meaningful experiences at out-of-the-way areas, like Chimney Tops in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park .

( Related: Check out these eight epic drives across America .)

Travel advisors will become essential

Conde Nast Traveller sustainability editor Juliet Kinsman predicts a shift to booking travel through agents and established operators, noting their invaluable knowledge and industry connections. “I think what 2020 has shown and taught us is the expertise and financial protection of booking through a travel agent often outweighs the amount you pay in commission,” she says. Additionally, she hopes that consumers will look to agents who specialize in the environment. “Those who care about where they send their customers can intuitively cut through greenwash and really ensure every link in the supply chain is an honorable one,” she says.

Related: Amazing architecture you can see from your car window

Take action: Find a travel advisor : The American Society of Travel Advisors maintains a database that allows travelers to search by destination, type of journey (such as eco-tourism or genealogy), and cohort (such as LGBTQ+ travelers). Virtuoso , a network of advisors specializing in luxury travel, can help with good deals, convenient itineraries, and tailored experiences.

We’ll appreciate staying closer to home

Some are discovering the benefits of travel even at home. Blogger Jessie Festa of Epicure & Culture and Jessie on a Journey normally travels internationally once a month. These days, online cultural cooking classes, games, and virtual experiences are helping her “to keep the spirit of travel alive by considering the feelings that travel elicits,” she says. Exchanging postcards with her extended travel community is another “beautiful way to ‘experience’ travel again, safely,” she adds.

“When we compare everything to being locked up indefinitely in our respective towers, a walk to the park can feel like travel,” says blogger Chris Mitchell of Traveling Mitch . “Now people are willing to see the magic in a meal on a patio at a restaurant down the street.”

Take action: Get outside, says the Norwegian concept “ friluftsliv ,” an idea of outdoor living that promises to make the pandemic’s colder months more bearable.

( Related: Here’s why walking is the ideal pandemic activity .)

Planning trips will become joyful again

Although some people are making the best of being grounded, this difficult period is reminding them that travel is important for boosting mental health and personal growth. There’s research to back it up. A 2013 survey of 483 U.S. adults found that travel improves empathy, energy, attention, and focus. Planning a trip is just as effective—a 2014 Cornell study showed that looking forward to travel substantially increases happiness, more than anticipating buying material goods.

Joanna Penn can attest to the healing benefits of both. The U.K.-based author and podcaster behind The Creative Penn and Books and Travel normally travels to research her books. “For me my writing life is all about what I learned when I travel,” she said in a recent podcast, “the ideas that come from being someplace new.” Her future trips will include walking the Camino de Santiago in 2022. Studying maps and determining a route makes her feel like she’s working toward a real goal. “I can expand my comfort zone without too much stress, especially if I accept that things might get canceled,” she said.

Take action: Plan a trip now, with inspiration from this essay on why travel should be considered an essential human activity.

Related Topics

• CORONAVIRUS
• SUSTAINABLE TOURISM
• MENTAL HEALTH
• VOLUNTOURISM

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A Year without travel

In Hawaii, Reimagining Tourism for a Post-Pandemic World

Before Covid, ‘tourism was at this point where everything was about tourists.’ With the one-year anniversary of travel’s collapse, the state, like other overtouristed places, is hoping for a reset.

By Tariro Mzezewa

For a visitor who was on the island of Oahu in 2019 when a record 10.4 million people visited Hawaii , returning to Honolulu nearly a year after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic is breathtaking.

At Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, souvenir shops and nearly all food vendors have closed. In neighborhoods around the state’s capital, restaurants and bars, tour operators and travel agencies have shuttered permanently, and many that remain appear to be shells of the popular jaunts they were before the pandemic. Hotels with skeleton staffs. No tourist-filled buses blocking the entrances to attractions. Plenty of room to move on sidewalks without bumping shoulders.

Meanwhile, the state continues to solidify its reopening procedures for travelers from the mainland and international destinations as well as between the islands.

And yet, according to one survey by the Hawaii Tourism Authority, the agency charged with promoting Hawaii around the world, about two-thirds of Hawaii residents say they still do not want tourists to return to the islands.

“Before the pandemic, tourism was at this point where everything was about tourists,” said Lindsey Ozawa, a farmer and chef in He’eia on Oahu. “Tourism had become extractive and hurtful, with tourists coming here and taking, taking, taking, taking, without any reciprocation with locals.”

Mr. Ozawa’s frustrations are felt by people beyond the Pacific, in popular destinations like Machu Picchu, Venice, Barcelona and Iceland, where residents bemoan inconsiderate travelers, damage to natural resources, overcrowding and the rising cost of housing because of short-term rentals created for tourists.

In those places, as in Hawaii, the screeching halt in travel after the World Health Organization’s March 11 declaration of a pandemic provided a moment to reimagine and reconfigure tourism. Without visitors running amok, institutions, government agencies and individuals who work in the travel industry or are touched by it have been searching for ways to change a sector that many describe as a necessary evil or an addictive drug from which destinations need to wean themselves.

In September, representatives of 22 European cities, including Berlin, Bologna and Prague, met with a European Commission leader to call for stricter regulations on short-term vacation rentals. In Venice, officials have taken steps to better manage the city’s crowds by collecting data on visitors’ movements — working from a “smart” control room, CNN reported , officials use phone data to see where tourists are from, how long they spend in the city and which places they visit.

And back in the United States, in November, residents of Key West, Fla., have approved three referendums to limit cruise visitors.

Among the goals of these destinations, as they await the return of visitors, is to make tourism better, not only for guests, but for locals and their communities, and to broaden their economies, so they aren’t almost solely reliant on tourism.

Rethinking state parks

For travelers heading to Oahu, a hike up Diamond Head State Monument is likely on the to-do list. The distinctive silhouette of the crater is as much a part of the quintessential tourist experience as a visit to Waikiki Beach.

In 2019, more than 1.2 million visitors went to Diamond Head. The park was open every day. Staff had to rush to clean bathrooms, which led to lines of irritated visitors. Wear-and-tear was visible from the litter near the summit to the paint on the sign at the bottom of the hike that’s a popular spot for taking photos.

In recent years, getting into Diamond Head has been a frustrating experience for tourists. The combination of tour buses depositing hundreds of guests at the park’s entrance throughout the day, with many others opting to either drive or walk in, led to crowding and long waits to enter the park. Residents said that the overflow into the neighborhood made everyday living exhausting.

Cassandra Springer, a state park ranger, said that people who didn’t prepare for the hike and became dehydrated often had to be rescued . Others regularly strayed off designated areas, saying they didn’t see the signs. Ms. Springer said the badly behaved guests were, at times, overwhelming.

“I’d tell people to stay where they are supposed to, to follow the rules, and I’d go to the summit in the afternoon and talk to people, and say, try to take your pictures, enjoy the view, but please don’t linger, don’t crowd. Other people would like to see the view,” Ms. Springer said. Some would argue with her or try to justify why they were allowed to break the rules.

At Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources, staff and leaders said they felt the pain of losing tourists and their money in 2020, but they also welcomed the pause to rethink how to run a state park.

After successfully creating a reservation system at Haena State Park on Kauai and at Waianapanapa State Park on Maui, limiting parking spaces and implementing a slew of other changes at the parks, the department turned its attention to Diamond Head.

During the pandemic, the Department of Land and Natural Resources added traffic lights on either side of Kahala Tunnel, which visitors must drive and walk through to enter and exit the park, essentially turning the tunnel into an alternating one-way access route. The pedestrian walkway at the entrance was more than doubled to encourage people to walk in rather than drive. The parking vendor created a designated location for ride-share drivers to drop off and pick up passengers.

Curt Cottrell, an administrator for the Division of State Parks, said that the department has raised prices for nonresidents and hopes to lower patronage into the park in order to make the experience of hiking more enjoyable.

Mr. Cottrell added that making life easier for locals who live in the community was an important part of the process of reimagining the park and how tourists visit it.

As in many other destinations that are rethinking tourism, technology and data are key to making changes. In advance of post-pandemic crowds, the department is culling through pre-pandemic and current data to understand guest behavior. Cellphone information provided by UberMedia and on-site park data allow Ms. Springer and Mr. Cottrell to get an idea of how many guests have out-of-state phone numbers, which of those people are wandering in parts of the park where they aren’t supposed to be, and what time of day they typically arrive and leave, which will inform how the reservation system is set up.

There is currently an effort to implement a reservation system to limit the number of people in the park at any one time, and Mr. Cottrell and Ms. Springer are hopeful that they will be able to offer different prices for different times of day and the year, all changes that the pandemic made possible to reimagine.

“These kinds of changes would enhance the quality of the experience,” Mr. Cottrell said. “Those are the things we want to have in place before we hit, God forbid, the 2019 massive tourism levels again.”

A shift away from tourism

Conversations with locals about tourism and the future of Hawaii tend to fall into three camps. There are the absolutists who say that tourism is destroying Hawaii and should be done away with. Those in this camp tend to believe that the Tourism Authority, which received $79 million in transient accommodations tax funds that are added to the daily cost of guest lodging, should no longer receive funding from the government . That money, they say, should go to local communities.

The second group, the status quo, takes the opposite stance: Tourism should remain the lifeblood of the economy — it’s easy, it works, keeps people employed and everyone knows how to live with it.

The third group, the compromisers, is of the opinion that tourism can and should exist in concert with other sectors like farming, retail, health care and culture, and not trample on them as it has in the recent past.

That last group points to the potential for growth in farming and what are called “green collar jobs,” which grew during the pandemic, as unemployment rose in other sectors of the economy, primarily tourism.

Kako‘o Oiwi is a farm that has been working to restore hundreds of acres of wetlands to their native state by cultivating taro, a root vegetable and once a staple in Hawaii, in abundant, terraced patches. Before the pandemic, the farm’s leaders had been discussing how to amp up its eco-tourism programs. They were surprised when more locals started coming by to work the land last year.

“I realized that people don’t have the time to come here under normal circumstances,” said Mr. Ozawa, the farmer and chef.

Such activities might not be able to replace tourism, but can be added to the tourism economy when it recovers. One of the organizations that has partnered with Kako‘o Oiwi to provide resources and workers is Kupu , a nonprofit that provides service programs in conservation and sustainability.

Last year, with stimulus money from the CARES Act, Kupu hired more than 350 people, many of whom had lost their jobs in hospitality and tourism, as part of its Kupu Aina Corps program. Participants worked on farms and in other community jobs. Between September and December, Kupu produced more than $6.5 million in economic benefit for Hawaii, but ran out of funding.

John Leong, the chief executive of Kupu, said this model could be expanded to offer employment to more people as a means of diversifying the economy and providing those who work in tourism new opportunities and skills.

“There’s an opportunity to tweak tourism so it has more of a values-driven focus, culturally and environmentally,” Mr. Leong said. “We should give people the tourism industry and give them an alternative.”

For tourists around the world, Hawaii’s main draw is its beauty: beaches, parks, fresh air — all natural resources, which, increasingly, locals worry are being harmed by too many tourists. These resources, many point out, can be overused and damaged. They are finite.

“In order for tourism to remain vibrant, the land and community need to be cared for,” Mr. Leong said. “When tourism reaches a point where it extracts without giving back, that threatens community, the environment and more.”

Promoting Hawaiian culture

Nestled in the Kalihi neighborhood of Honolulu, is the Bishop Museum, a natural history museum that focuses on Hawaii’s culture, past and present. During the pandemic, the museum’s team has been developing its virtual memberships, its Japanese language programing and it has doubled down on partnerships with organizations. When the museum opened in June after closing earlier in the year, its 15-acre ​outdoor area became a space for exhibitions and a place to take an audio tour of the gardens, listen to live music and more.

“Part of what the pandemic made a lot of us do is think about what’s important, what we value the most and where to put strategic investments,” said Melanie Ide, the museum’s president and chief executive.

In 1921, the museum endorsed research presented by the anthropologist Louis R. Sullivan at the Second International Eugenics Conference. Mr. Sullivan, with financial support from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, spent time in Hawaii photographing, interviewing and studying locals, with the intention of measuring and classifying the physical traits of a “pure” Native Hawaiian race. Although eugenics has long been discredited, myths about racial superiority being a scientific rather than social construct have perpetuated racism and had traumatic effects on communities in Hawaii and beyond.

The museum’s current exhibition, “(Re)Generations: Challenging Scientific Racism in Hawaiʻi” takes this on. It reappropriates Mr. Sullivan’s own work and uses it to celebrate the ways Native Hawaiians have reclaimed his photographs, plaster busts and tools to learn about their ancestors, genealogy and family. When the exhibition opened in February, 100 years after Mr. Sullivan presented his work, many of the people who attended were the descendants of those who had been prodded and violated by the anthropologist.

The exhibition is also a case study in how to take a different approach to tourism. The show’s curators — the museum’s archive director, Leah Caldera, the archaeology curator, Jillian Swift and the genome scientist and University of California San Diego professor Keolu Fox — said it was created for Hawaiians. Interviews with the families whose stories are a key part of the exhibition, and rather than being spoken for by outsiders, the families speak for themselves. Their heirlooms are included and family histories underscored.

But the exhibition can also be appreciated by tourists looking to learn something new about the islands or Pacific Island cultures more broadly.

By having a program that centers on Hawaiian history and experiences in a space that is frequented by tourists, the museum is sending the message that anyone who enters must be willing to engage with more of Hawaii than its beaches.

“A lot of people come to Hawaii and don’t know where they are except what might be in the popular imagination and culture,” Ms. Ide said. “We hope people who come here can get oriented and grounded in the culture of Hawaii.”

A more regenerative role for tourism

For many Hawaii residents, a large part of rethinking tourism involves rethinking the role of the tourism authority, which was established by the state legislature in 1998 to serve as “the state’s lead agency supporting tourism.” Many Hawaii residents believe that the organization has become too powerful and overfunded, pushing tourism at the expense of everything else.

After the outbreak of the pandemic, Governor David Ige issued an executive order ceasing the disbursement of hotel and other transient accommodation taxes paid by visitors to the agency. Those funds have, since last year, been utilized to support other government operations.

Many are hopeful that John De Fries, who became the chief executive of the Tourism Authority in September, will be able to lead the islands into an era where tourism is more regenerative than extractive. Mr. De Fries is the first Native Hawaiian to lead the organization and business owners who rely on tourism are counting on him to represent their interests as he thinks about how to market the islands in a post-pandemic world.

“We are at a time when our very survival is at stake,” Mr. De Fries said. “We understand that there are currencies other than cash that we have to reconcile. Some of those other currencies are the natural environment, a sense of well-being in the community. There’s currency in ensuring that Hawaiian cultural traditions are and should be protected.”

In January 2020, the tourism authority created a 2020-2025 strategic plan with four pillars or areas of focus — natural resources, Hawaiian culture, community and brand marketing — to manage tourism responsibly going forward. When the pandemic hit, the agency decided to continue working on the plan. In particular, it kept consulting with residents about how they feel about tourism.

Mr. De Fries, who grew up in Waikiki and has seen tourism turn to overtourism over the past three decades, said that his approach for moving forward will emphasize regenerative travel through the Hawaiian ancestral idea of malama which means “to nurture.” The four pillars, he said, will be a guiding force.

“Everyone I talk to — hotel owners, elders, even the people who don’t like tourism — agrees that we all want future generations to have a natural resource base that’s in better condition than it is now, so we have to care for it and anyone with any aloha for this place will understand that.”

It’s a lesson that other overtouristed destinations might learn from.

Paige McClanahan contributed reporting from Europe.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram , Twitter and Facebook . And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation.

An earlier version of this article misstated the status of entrance fees for nonresidents for Diamond Head State Monument in Hawaii. The park has raised the rates.

How we handle corrections

Tariro Mzezewa is a travel reporter at The New York Times.  More about Tariro Mzezewa

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Tourism research after the COVID-19 outbreak: Insights for more sustainable, local and smart cities

Luis-alberto casado-aranda.

a Department of Marketing and Market Research, University of Granada, Campus Universitario Cartuja, 18011, Granada, Spain

Juan Sánchez-Fernández

b Department of Marketing and Market Research, University of Granada, Campus Universitario Cartuja, 18011, Granada, Spain

Ana-Belén Bastidas-Manzano

c Department of Tourism and Marketing, Madrid Open University, Vía de Servicio A-6, 15, 28400 Collado Villalba, Madrid, Spain

This paper presents the results of a bibliometric analysis of academic research dealing with COVID-19 in the area of city destination development from 1 December 2019 to 31 March 2021. Particularly, by means of SciMAT software, it identifies, quantifies, and visually displays the main research clusters, thematic structure and emerging trends that city and tourism planners will face in the new normal. The search revealed that social media and smart tourism are the themes with the greatest potential; sustainable cities, local destination development, changes in tourist behavior, and tourists’ risk perception are underdeveloped streams with enormous relevance and growth in the new normal. Research on the effects of COVID-19 on citizen health and its economic impact on the tourism industry and cities are intersectional and highly developed topics, although of little relevance. The current study also identifies the challenges of destination research for planners and proposes future research directions. Consequently, this paper contributes to the existing literature on COVID-19 and sustainable cities, as it develops a critical examination of the extant research and points out the research gaps that must be filled by future studies.

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in December 2019 has affected the health, biomedical, environmental, and tourism sectors, among others. Hospitality and tourism are productive sectors that have been acutely affected by the outbreak. Local and regional COVID-19 lockdowns, coupled with international travel restrictions, have affected international and domestic hospitality as well as day visits, damaging sectors including public and air transport, restaurants, hotels, accommodations, festivals, and sports events ( Hao, Xiao & Chon, 2020 ). Secondary sectors such as catering, laundry, and fuels have also suffered drastically ( Gössling, Scott & Hall, 2020 ). For example, the US restaurant industry, by 15 July, saw about 7 million layoffs and the complete closure of 60% of restaurants. The shutdown of nearly 16,000 of these businesses became permanent by 24 July (Croft, Jay, 2020 ). Airports were expected to suffer a total of USD 76.6 billion of losses in 2020 ( Garcia, 2020 ). As a whole, according to a study by EMSI ( Jay, 2020 ), for every day that the US hospitality sector is shut down, it loses 12,000 jobs and more than USD 534 million in revenue.

In order to establish future solutions for the recovery of the sector, scholars are publishing a great deal of articles every day. Specifically, city development scholars are evaluating the consequences for the tourism industry and investigating the consequences for citizen purchasing behavior after COVID-19. In order to synthesize this unprecedented amount of articles, scholars are using systematic reviews and bibliometric studies aiming to synthesize results in the biomedical, political, economic, and health fields, among others ( Casado-Aranda, Viedma-del-Jesús, & Sánchez-Fernández, 2020 ). Although some avenues in city and tourism research have been discussed ( Zenker & Kock, 2020 ), the relevance of multidisciplinary studies on COVID-19 in tourism has been assessed ( Wen, Wang, Kozak, Liu & Hou, 2020 ), the human mobility behavior in COVID-19 has been cleared up (Benita, 2021), and the impacts and implications of resetting research and international sectors have been specified ( Farzanegan, Gholipour, Feizi, Nunkoo & Andargoli, 2020 ; Sigala, 2020 ; Škare et al., 2020), no systematic review has assessed the unforeseen growth of COVID-19 articles in the area of city development and tourism and identified the main research clusters and challenges that the tourism industry and academia will face in the future. This approach could shed light on the current scope, features, and topics of interest relating to COVID-19 and tourism. More importantly, a systematic review of the publications on COVID-19 and tourism would make it possible to reveal the typologies of tourism, the forms of its management, and expected changes in tourist behavior, which will gain comparatively more importance at the global level in the so-called new normal.

Considering the above-mentioned research gap, the current analysis was aimed at developing a systematic review in order to answer the following research questions:

RQ1: What was the growth in publications on COVID-19, city development, and tourism indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases between 1 December 2019 and 31 March 2021?

RQ2: What are the main journals, authors, and publications worth considering in future studies on tourism and COVID-19?

RQ3: Which are the key emerging topics and subthemes of research on tourism after the COVID-19 outbreak?

RQ4: What is the role of sustainable tourism, local development and its management, and new tourist behavior in the new normal after COVID-19?

Overall, RQ1 and RQ2 are important to academics who wish to publish papers and understand the city and tourism literature after the COVID-19 pandemic. RQ3 aims to provide insightful novel contributions regarding the identification of research clusters by means of co-citation analysis. RQ4 discusses future avenues of city development and tourism theory and practice after COVID-19. All in all, this research contributes to the existing literature on COVID-19 and sustainable and smart cities as it conducts a critical analysis of the extant research and points out the research gaps that must be filled by future studies. The following section explains the specific search strategy of the systematic review, lists the requirements for inclusion and exclusion of articles, describes the phases of bibliometric analysis and the software used, and lists the range of years analyzed.

2. General framework: COVID-19 and a call for more sustainable, smart, and local cities

Before the pandemic began, the literature on the development of cities as social, cultural, and professional centers was already commenting on a dramatic rise of so-called smart cities, that is, cities that implement helpful strategies for citizen accessibility and wellness, and provide clear support for environmental, digital, and e-governmental decisions. A study by Bastidas-Manzano et al. (2020), for example, performed a comprehensive review of 258 investigations published between 2013 and 2019 on the topic of smart and sustainable cities. Their results confirmed the following:

(i) Although there is not yet a clear definition of what a smart city is, such a concept constitutes a motor topic with high potential for development and influence on the rise of technology, sustainability, and accessibility in traditional cities.

(ii) Given the strong impact of tourism on cities and territories (Femenia-Serra et al., F. V., 2019 ), it is imperative to analyze the relationship of tourism with the development of smart cities, combined under the concept of smart tourism, which is currently booming in the framework of a greater dependence on information and communication technologies, as it allows vast amounts of data in the tourism sector to be transformed into value for citizens and consumers.

(iii) Tools such as big data, the Internet of Things, and smart devices constitute intelligent platforms in which each object is connected to a network, linking the physical and digital world and facilitating more responsible, efficient, and healthier lifestyles.

(iv) Sustainability has acquired greater importance, as it constitutes a key piece of today's cities by making the lives of residents easier and offering sustainable and responsible management of natural resources.

The advent of COVID-19 has accelerated all processes aimed at reducing contact and making communication, transport, and policies more efficient. Already in an initial study, Sigala (2020) evidenced the need for a collective effort and understanding of the new challenges after COVID-19, aiming to advance and reset the industry and research on tourism and city development. The current research aims to identify this research gap and, through a bibliometric analysis and critical discussion, advance the understanding and clarification of future research challenges in sustainable, smart cities and the influence of tourism.

3. Materials and methods: a bibliometric study

The current study carried out consultations on 31 March 2021 on the WoS and Scopus databases. The query consultation in the WoS included keywords associated with COVID-19: "COVID-19″ OR "Covid-19″ OR "2019-nCoV" OR "SARS-CoV-2″ OR "coronavirus" OR "corona virus". In particular, we filter in the WoS categories of: Hospitality Leisure Sport Tourism, Economics, Management and Urban Studies, Environmental Studies or Business. In Scopus, the consulted added the previous keywords together with “tourism” OR “hospitality”. We were interested in the titles, abstracts and keywords of articles and reviews written in English.

The starting search revealed over 1514 articles in English, 211 of which were duplicates and eliminated from further analysis. We then obtained 1303 papers published between 1 December 2019 and 31 March 2021. In the analysis, we used the SciMAT tool ( Cobo, López-Herrera, Herrera-Viedma & Herrera, 2011 ), which constitutes a methodology useful for exploring the theoretical background of a given branch. Considering the output derived from the previous queries, the SciMAT software (i) classified the 1303 manuscripts by publication date, citations, and journal titles and (ii) implemented a co-word search to clarify the most impactful topics associated with COVID-19 and tourism (Cobo et al., 2012). A co-word analysis constitutes a content analysis tool that makes use of patterns of co-occurrence of several items (such as words or nouns) within a collection of manuscripts aiming to recognize the links between ideas within the subject topics included in the corpus of texts. In our case, the co-word phase used text-mining tools for the titles, abstracts, and keywords, leading to the development of a strategic diagram highlighting the relative relevance of the topics associated with the tourism sector after the COVID-19 outbreak. This strategic diagram represents a graph implemented with the SciMAT software that highlights major topics based on their density and centrality. Density constitutes a measure of theme development, and centrality highlights the relevance of a theme. The union of low and high intensities of density and centrality facilitates the establishment of four quadrants: driving themes (strong centrality and high density), highly isolated topics (low centrality and high density), emerging issues (low centrality and density), and basic topics (high centrality and low density). ( Cobo et al., 2011 ).

During the co-word step, we used the main default values detailed by Cobo et al. (2011) . Particularly, we first selected the author's words and the source's words and added words as units of analyses. Afterwards, we used a minimum frequency of two words from a co-occurrence matrix aiming to calculate the similarities between the selected items. We then made use of an equivalence index as a normalization measure. Likewise, we followed the Simple Center Algorithm, with a maximum network size of 4 and a minimum of 1. The purpose of such a phase was to clarify the most relevant networks. Finally, we used the “number of documents” and the “number of citations” as a quality measure of the strategic diagram.

4.1. Scientific performance

The results of the bibliometric analysis as extracted by the SciMAT tool ( Cobo et al., 2011 ) revealed a corpus of 1303 peer-reviewed publications linking the pandemic with tourism. We identified 89% through Scopus and 11% through WoS. It is worth noting that 59% of the WoS and 64% of the Scopus publications are open access.

The effects of the COVID-19 crisis on the hospitality and tourism industries are evidenced in hospitality outlets such as International Journal of Hospitality Management and International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management . Many articles appear in tourism and sustainable publications such as Tourism Geographies, Annals of Tourism Research , and Journal of Sustainable Tourism ( Table 1 ). The academics with the largest contributions on this matter are primarily from Canadian, Australian, and Chinese universities ( Table 2 ). Some of them are especially relevant for a large number of manuscripts: Vanessa Ratten (La Trobe University), Jenny Kim (Youngsan University), and Jianping Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences). Table 3 shows the 10 most highly cited articles within the obtained sample.

Outlets with greatest amount of research on COVID-19 and hospitality and tourism from 1 December 2019 to 31 March 2021.

Authors with the greatest number of publications on COVID-19 and tourism.

Top 10 publications by number of citations on COVID-19 and tourism.

4.2. Content analysis

The content analysis of the keywords used with SciMAT revealed nine main themes: tourism, social media, public health, economic impact, smart cities/tourism, COVID-19, risk perception, sustainable tourism, and consumer behavior. The strategic diagram shown in Fig. 2 highlights the combination of topics on COVID-19 and tourism based on density and centrality criteria. The number of papers including each keyword is proportional to the volume of each sphere. This content analysis was also aimed at shedding light on the link between the keywords and the most recurrent subtopics by means of so-called thematic networks; specifically, “the size of the spheres for a thematic network is proportional to the number of articles corresponding to each keyword, whereas the width of the link between two spheres i and j is proportional to the e ij equivalence index” (Author1 et al., Casado-Aranda, Viedma-del-Jesús, & Sánchez-Fernández, 2020 ). The following section describes the strategic diagram and the main thematic networks derived from the content analysis.

Representation of a strategic diagram.

Strategic diagram of the period December 2019 to March 2021 based on publications.

Data analysis shows that most COVID-19-related tourism publications suggested that the themes with greatest potential (motor themes) in the selected period were social media and smart tourism. This reflects that tourism research during the COVID-19 era has prioritized new forms of tourism that use technology, accessibility, and sustainability as fundamental axes (i.e., smart tourism), as well as accelerated digitalization and social media in the provision of tourism services after the COVID-19 outbreak. Fig. 3 shows that two of the themes associated with the smart tourism and social media axis are mobility and hotels, reflecting interest in the use of technology and accessible spaces to monitor tourist mobility and evaluate its influence on hotel performance.

Main thematic networks exploring effects of COVID-19 on tourism industry.

Sustainable tourism, consumer behavior, and risk perception constitute emerging topics that, although not widely developed, may be relevant axes with potential for future analysis. Research specifically exploring changes in consumer and tourist behavior turned out to be the least developed. As a whole, these major themes highlight the forms and elements of tourism that are gaining prominent interest in the new normal after COVID-19 ( Fig. 4 ). The thematic networks reflect new trends and topics in consumer behavior in the new era, such as prosumer, the use of online payment methods, and changes in lifestyle and travel. In addition, risk perception is becoming a topic of growing interest for the recovery of the tourism sector in general, and the airline industry in particular ( Fig. 5 ).

Thematic networks evaluating interactions between COVID-19 and sustainability in the tourism industry.

Thematic networks assessing effects of COVID-19 on technology in the tourism industry.

The major themes of tourism and public health are have acquired significant relevance in the period under analysis but are intersectional with all research on tourism, hospitality, and COVID-19. The upper left sector of Fig. 2 refers to the economic impact of COVID-19, which encompasses highly developed themes. Specifically, research has analyzed how public policies, hospitality and tourism company strategies, and periods of lockdown have socially and economically affected the performance of the tourism sector globally ( Fig. 6 ).

Thematic networks revealing effects of COVID-19 on consumer behavior in the tourism industry.

5. Rebuilding the future of cities and tourism development: knowledge domains and challenges after the COVID-19 outbreak

Once the main thematic axes and networks were clarified, we further conducted a comprehensive empirical review of the selected studies, aiming to classify the main thematic axes established above into tourism research domains. We know from the literature on business management, and tourism in particular, that business performance is influenced by macro- and microenvironmental factors. The macroenvironment includes forces external to the company of a health, social, economic, or political nature that affect tourism management and performance. The microenvironment, on the other hand, incorporates all stakeholders with which the company does business (e.g., suppliers, investors, or governments, among others), one of the most important of which is tourists (Hassan, 2000). Studies in tourism management, in fact, have largely shown that tourism strategies depend, to a large extent, on macroenvironmental factors (such as COVID-19, government policies, or social movements) and microenvironmental factors (such as tourist behavior) (Polo-Peña et al., 2012). Authors such as Duvenage (2016), Mhlanga (2019) , and Wang and Ap (2013) conclude that identifying the micro- and macroenvironmental factors that affect tourism management could be a starting point for unlocking the industry's challenges.

Along this line, this paper next examines how COVID-19 (as a macroenvironmental factor) has affected other macroenvironmental forces (such as economics, social movements, and tourism-related lifestyles) and microenvironmental forces (such as modifications in tourist behavior), and the effects of these two major forces on changes in tourism management after the COVID-19 outbreak ( Fig. 7 ).

Conceptual framework for effects of COVID-19 on tourism management.

5.1. Macro-factors: effects of COVID-19 on tourism development: economy, travel, prices, and workforce

The first knowledge domain of the COVID-19 literature evaluates the economic and social impact, in figures, of COVID-19 in sectors involved in tourism, e.g., cruise ships, events, bookings, and hotels. In a similar vein, recent research has also assessed how companies, intermediaries, and sales forces have adapted to the new reality of COVID-19.

5.1.1. Economic consequences of COVID-19

Recent research in the tourism field has assessed the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on firm performance. For example, Williams (2020) concluded that COVID-19 impacted 81% of the worldwide tourism workforce. The World Tourism Organization in 2019 predicted a 4% increase in international arrivals by 2020; after the COVID-19 outbreak, it changed its prediction to a 30% reduction in worldwide arrivals in 2020, which translates to a loss of USD 300–450 billion in the worldwide tourism sector. The US restaurant industry, for example, saw about 7 million layoffs and a complete closure of 60% of its restaurants by 15 July. The shutdown of nearly 16,000 of these businesses became permanent by 24 July (Croft, Jay, 2020 ; The Seattle Times, 2020). Airports predicted losses of USD 76.6 billion in 2020 ( Garcia, 2020 ). Furthermore, Ludvigsen and Hayton (2020) stated that because of COVID-19, national institutions banned collective events, which strongly damaged that industry. Flew and Kirkwood (2020) evaluated how COVID-19 has impacted art, culture, and communication in Australia and concluded that less than half of arts and recreation firms were active in early March 2020. These results show that this industry was most strongly affected by COVID-19. Sharma and Nicolau (2020) , along the same line, concluded that airlines, hotels, car rentals, and cruise lines reduced their valuation, which should cause concern about their long-term outlook, especially the cruise industry.

5.1.2. Demand and price for tourist and hospitality services

Other research has gone deeper into the effects of COVID-19 on the demand for tourist and city services and on price fluctuations. Gallego and Font (2020) , using Skyscanner data on air tourist searches between November 2018 and December 2020, developed a tool for tourist firms aiming to reduce the impacts of the pandemic. The findings show that travel was reduced by 30% in Europe and 50% in Asia. In addition, travel intentions were reduced by about 10–20%. Uğur and Akbıyık (2020) presented the reactions of travelers on TripAdvisor forums during the COVID-19 pandemic and revealed that the crisis greatly affected the tourism sector as soon as news of the pandemic was disseminated, with increased travel cancellations and delays. Similarly, Dubois (2020) reported a 96% reduction in Airbnb bookings. Foo, Chin, Tan and Phuah (2020) and Mariolis, Rodousakis and Soklis (2020) analyzed the consequences of COVID-19 on the hospitality and tourism sectors in Malaysia and Greece, respectively. Mariolis et al. (2020) confirmed that the losses in the tourism sector led to a reduction in GDP of about 6%. Liew (2020) assessed the effects of the pandemic on tourism share prices, which benefit from packaged-tour business services and online hotel reservations, and revealed a dramatic drop in tourism sector outcomes amid COVID-19. In a similar vein, Shakibaei et al. ( M., 2021 ) assessed the impact of the pandemic on travel behavior in Istanbul. Their findings revealed not only a crucial reduction in travel demand for commuting, leisure, and shopping trips, but also a shift to teleworking and increased importance of hygiene and comfort on public transportation.

5.1.3. Governments and aid to the tourism sector

The COVID-19 pandemic has also affected the workforce of the tourism industry. Huang, Makridis, Baker, Medeiros and Guo (2020) , for example, concluded that company closures were related to a 30% drop in non-salaried workers in the hospitality sector from March to April 2020. Williams (2020) stated that governments worldwide offered a great amount of financial support to the companies and employees affected, with offers up to USD 2500 per employee in the United Kingdom. COVID-19 and periods of lockdown caused a drastic reduction in the ability of small- and medium-sized enterprises in the tourism sector to hire more staff, offer job security, or improve working conditions, as shown by Baum, Mooney, Robinson and Solnet (2020) . Large hotel companies, however, are better positioned to recover economically and financially and should therefore be pioneers in developing policies and strategies for the stabilization of tourism and hotel personnel.

5.2. Micro-factors: effects of COVID-19 on tourist behavior

The COVID-19 outbreak and periods of lockdown modified not only the ways in which tourists (as the main element of the microenvironment) search for destination information, but also their preferences, attitudes, and behaviors during and after receiving tourist or hospitality services. Particularly, studies in the field of tourism have largely proposed six new pillars on which the new tourist behavior will be based in the new normal: sustainability; interest in local, technology, and smart cities; luxury services; hygiene protocols; and emotions.

5.2.1. Sustainability

Much of the research on sustainable cities and tourism has proposed that the future of cities and tourist development should take a sustainable approach. According to Higgins-Desbiolles (2020) and Buckley (2020) , one of the main challenges in the industry after COVID-19 is having long-term, sustainable, and equitable development in the service of local societies. Environmental degradation, economic exploitation, and overcrowding of traditional tourism services must be replaced by care for the animals, nature, and local landscape of tourist destinations ( Casado-Díaz, Sancho-Esper, Rodriguez-Sanchez & Sellers-Rubio, 2020 ; Crossley, 2020 ). Along the same line, Everingham and Chassagne (2020) proposed a future hospitality and tourism industry that offers environmental and social well-being. In alignment with this reasoning, He and Harris (2020) noted that COVID-19 offers an invaluable opportunity for firms to engage in more authentic corporate social responsibility and face international environmental and social challenges.

Following this research line, Wu (2021) recently highlighted the need to use system optimization algorithms based on artificial intelligence technologies to create greener hospitals in sustainable cities. Prideaux, Thompson and Pabel (2020) argued that using “flattening the curve” strategies learned through COVID-19 and adopting a circular economy model will help avert climate change and city noise. Chen and Zhang (2021) evaluated the driving factors of city sustainability based on interactions among multiple indicators and concluded that environmental indicators constitute the most significant drivers affecting city sustainability, thus are more greatly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Authors such as Agarwal et al. (2021) , Kumar et al. (2020) , and Wang and Li (2021) noted indoor and outdoor quality improvement during and after the pandemic. Similar conclusions were highlighted by Rumpler, Venkataraman and Göransson (2020) and Basu et al. (2021) , who observed reductions in noise levels during the COVID-19 restrictions comparable to those found during the two most popular public holidays. These publications indicate that the new normal will attach comparatively high importance to more sustainable, inclusive forms of tourism, based on a circular economy that rewards the environmental and social well-being of all stakeholders, namely residents, tourists, institutions, and tourism companies. This will inevitably lead to an activation of local relations, networks, and connections that could benefit local economic development.

A study by Jones and Comfort (2020) is of particular interest, as it offers some thoughts on modifications in the relationships between sustainability and the tourism sector subsequent to COVID-19. According to these authors, “The COVID-19 crisis is a spur to promote sustainable development much more widely, as an integral part of business continuity and recovery measures within the tourism industry”. They highlight the need for tourism professionals, governments, consumers, and health managers to work together efficiently not only to guarantee a safe society but also to meet the need for shared rules to encourage sustainable economic growth. According to Chen (2021) , the future of sustainable cities must include the integration of interdisciplinary knowledge, open information, and moral responsibility, and that will only be possible if all stakeholders (including relevant industries, governments, and communities) can together establish more socially inclusive policies and regulations for sustainable cities in a systematic manner. Investigations such as those by Chang, McAleer and Ramos (2020) and Ioannides and Gyimóthy (2020) further note that the COVID-19 crisis constitutes a great opportunity to escape the path of an unsustainable, overcrowded global tourism market. These results are in line with previous research findings in the field of nature-based tourism ( Tyrväinen, Uusitalo, Silvennoinen & Hasu, 2014 ).

5.2.2. Interest in local development

To achieve such sustainable development in the hospitality and tourism sectors, academics emphasize the need for local rather than global growth. In this regard, Jones and Comfort (2020) presented the term “human flourishing” as an alternative in the tourism industry that can reshape the sector into a model that is more inclusive of the stakeholders that rely on it, including host communities. This reasoning aligns with the conclusions of Everingham and Chassagne (2020) , who noted that the future of the hospitality and tourism industries must be small-scale and local and benefit host communities. Renaud (2020) argued that “power relations with destination communities can be critiqued using the concepts of global mobility and local mobility to show that the former is a weakness for the industry in a post-pandemic perspective of reduced mobility”. These authors contend that cities must make use of the sector's confidence in international mobility as leverage to rebuild the balance of power and encourage national mobility. In addition, Tomassini and Cavagnaro (2020) put forward a crucial consideration of the effects of COVID-19 on tourism and forecast positive activation of local networks that will enable sustainable, social, and local economic growth. According to Kunzmann (2020) , the future of hospitality and tourism “will range from ‘Return to normal after summer’ to ‘New power for the public sector’ and ‘Tourism at home’”.

Researchers in the hospitality and tourism field suggest that other forms of tourism and leisure will help achieve these sustainable and localized goals. For instance, Abbaspour, Soltani and Tham (2020) propose that tourist feelings and medical tourism images can be useful to help recovery plans. Seraphin and Dosquet (2020) encourage the development of second-home and mountain tourism as key paths in the development of further lines of personal and relaxing leisure activities. Furthermore, investigations have shown the emergence of new xenophobic tendencies among residents and consumers, as COVID-19 may have contributed to deepening in-group/out-group biases among foreign customers and residents ( Zenker & Kock, 2020 ).

5.2.3. Technology and smart cities

Before the COVID-19 outbreak, scholars such as Yuan, Tseng and Ho (2019) noted that we were in the midst of a transition to a new era of hospitality and travel based on the convergence of disruptive effects in the form of new technologies. This change has favored a proliferation and consolidation of smart cities, that is, those that strategically introduce information and communication technologies to improve their competitiveness and, simultaneously, residents’ quality of life (Yang et al., S., 2021 ). Along with consumer concerns for more sustainable and safe spaces, this makes technology a basic element in city development and the tourism sector. According to Gretzel ( U., 2020 ), COVID-19 has even heightened the need for more digitized, technological, and safe sectors that allow for monitoring of the flow of consumers and citizens.

On the one hand, the pandemic has encouraged what U. Gretzel et al. (2020) label e-hospitality and e-tourism, i.e., the application of IT and e-commerce to hospitality and tourism. The use of websites and social media in these sectors, according to these authors, facilitates a fast, secure, comfortable, vivid, and minimalist consumer experience (see Angostino et al. (2020) for the case of Italian museums). Technology can likewise facilitate consumer tracking and monitoring ( Sun, Shao & Chan, 2020 ). That is, the role of e-commerce, robotics, and artificial intelligence has increased to assist with managing the spread of COVID-19 in cities, tourism firms, hotels, and bars (e.g., Jiang & Wen, 2020 ; Makarius, Mukherjee, Fox & Fox, 2020 ; Zeng, Chen & Lew, 2020 ). According to these authors, robots, autonomous vehicles, and drones could be used in diverse ways to decrease tourist contact and possible dissemination of the virus, including delivering materials, disinfecting and sterilizing public spaces, and detecting or measuring body temperature. Further, Zeng et al. (2020) considered that the focus should now be placed on developing robotic applications that can improve the tourism experience, preserving cultural and natural environments, understanding the social implications of decisions made about tourism, and recognizing the need for new professional opportunities in the sector. A study by Zwanka and Buff (2020) evaluated potential consumer behaviors derived from the COVID-19 pandemic. These authors showed that, among other behaviors, consumers will make more use of online ordering (especially for products related to agriculture, fitness, and pharmacy, at the expense of kids’ activities or amusement parks), place more value on shopping experiences, replace travel with virtual reality, and reduce their restaurant visits

Second, the development of more digitalized cities is articulated in the concept of smart tourism, i.e., innovative destinations based on technology, sustainability, accessibility, social participation, and movement monitoring ( Bassano et al., 2019 ; Kapera, 2018 ; Kunzmann, 2020 ; Liberato, Alen & Liberato, 2018 ). Following this reasoning, first, the current public health crisis has made it necessary to urgently reconsider transport and its impact on economic recovery in the post-COVID-19 era. These transport improvements would go beyond social considerations in relation to the environment and encompass considerations of social health and well-being ( Budd & Ison, 2020 ). Jo, Lee, Park and Kim (2020) analyzed the case of South Korea as a smart city, where firms, citizens, and the government managed to flatten the curve during the COVID-19 crisis without closing their borders or their economy. In this case, the proactive exchange of information allowed tourists to form a shared comprehension of the context, while complying with the rules and security measures adopted to increase trust in the institution's ability to manage the crisis. Along this line, COVID-19 has highlighted the need for tourism organizations to create disaster management strategies. Creative and relevant products and services should be designed in partnership with health organizations so that they can be implemented in cities affected by pandemics in an integrated manner. Interestingly, a recent study by S. Yang and Chong (2021) showed that smart city projects significantly reduced the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. Specifically, for every 1 million yuan increase in smart city investment per 10,000 people, the number of confirmed cases per 10,000 people decreased by 0.342.

These normal planning activities, primarily environmental, will serve to mitigate the effects of another crisis ( Allam & Jones, 2020 ). Second, authors such as Allam and Jones (2020) urge global architectural and tourism firms to add pandemics to their disaster management action plans. Along this line, Jiang and Wen (2020) went deeper into the impacts of COVID-19 on hotel practices and concluded that artificial intelligence, cleanliness, and health care should all be considered in future tourism strategies. Choi, Lee and Jamal (2021) concluded in their case study that smart governance can develop smart justice that encourages equity in data sharing and resource allocation among inhabitants and tourists. Kuang and Lin (2021)) recently proposed that public and governmental participation are key to creating smarter sustainable cities; according to their findings, those who live in communities with more supportive and smarter facilities are more likely to participate in sustainable behaviors such as classifying garbage.

5.2.4. Luxury and private services

Fear of unfamiliar places and the hustle and bustle of travel could place greater value on the search for individualized, personalized, and luxury tourism services. Wen et al. (2020) evaluated the effects of COVID-19 on Chinese citizens’ lifestyle and purchases and confirmed that it will likely increase the popularity of independent travel, luxury purchases, and wellness tourism services. Along the same line, Kim and Lee (2020) investigated the impact of the perceived threat of COVID-19 and its relevance to consumers' preference for private dining facilities. Their results show that consumers who think the threat of COVID-19 is high (vs. low) value private dining tables and restaurants. Furthermore, the importance of COVID-19 triggers a preference for private (vs. non-private) dining table and rooms.

5.2.5. Hygiene and health protocols

Ivanova, Ivanov and Ivanov (2020) assessed tourists’ intentions to travel after the COVID-19 outbreak and revealed that they were willing to travel within 2 months after it is permitted in their location. A trustworthy health system in a smart location will be a key driver of consumers’ decisions. Interestingly, women and older persons reported stronger safety and health preferences than men and younger persons. Wong and Yang (2020) attempted to explore tourists’ experiences in quarantine lodging during COVID-19. Their results indicate that travelers’ level of anxiety accounted for the interaction between their length of stay and health status. Graham, Kremarik and Kruse (2020) evaluated the perceptions of aging consumers with regard to air travel after the COVID-19 outbreak. The authors concluded that elements such as quarantine rules and flexible ticket booking were not pivotal drivers impacting travel decisions, and getting to the airport is seen as the safest step. In a similar vein, Zenker and Kock (2020) noted that consumers may become more alert to crowds and avoid unknown things (i.e., xenophobia toward foreign food or restaurants).

5.2.6. Tourist emotions in the new normal: sentiments and perceived risk

Several investigations point out that tourists may value options that promote emotional experiences more highly, as they now evaluate the risk and sentiment of the visit according to the management of the pandemic crisis at the destination. For instance, Qiu, Park, Li and Song (2020) indicated that the intention to travel is influenced by one's perception of risk and level of familiarity with the destination. Similarly, Chen, Xia and He (2020) showed that, during the COVID-19 crisis, risk perception for travelers was increased by the number of vehicle changes for transport, travel time, and the impact of the pandemic on the tourist space. These authors contend that reducing the risk by offering countermeasures will revitalize the hospitality and tourism industries ( Chen et al., 2020 ). Aji, Berakon and Husin (2020)) found that the willingness to use e-wallets is affected by perceived risk and usefulness. Byrd et al. (2021) evaluated the risk perceptions of tourists in restaurants. Their results show that tourists are more worried about buying restaurant food than food in general. Furthermore, consumers are deeply concerned about buying food served cold or uncooked. Along the same line, Zheng, Luo and Ritchie (2021) revealed that travel fear provokes coping behaviors among travelers, increasing their resilience and causing them to develop cautious travel behavior. Recently, Pan et al. (2021) assessed the extent to which cruise travel constraints (such as COVID-19) and perceived pandemic crisis management affect post-pandemic cruise intent. The results revealed that restrictions are negatively related to confidence in cruising, which ultimately affects travel intent. Additionally, the perception of crisis management is positively related to confidence and one's attitude to returning to cruise travel. Brewer and Sebby (2021)) recently found that the visual appeal of an online restaurant menu and the perception of COVID-19 risk positively influence purchase intentions and the perceived convenience of online ordering. Furthermore, Akhtar, Akhtar, Usman, Ali and Siddiqi (2020) revealed that the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumer confidence and offline shopping choices was due to an increased sense of insecurity and risk.

5.3. Effects of macro- and micro-factors on tourism destination management

To cope with the increase in the above-mentioned macro- and micro-factors of tourism post-COVID-19, tourism firms will need to reset their strategies and traditional management paths, since the way they manage the crisis directly will affect consumers’ intention to visit their destinations (Pan et al., 2021).

Particularly, the experience of COVID-19 in the tourism sector has meant changes in the strategies of organizations and their workforce. Filimonau, Derqui and Matute (2020) , for example, investigated whether the organizational resilience of tourism firms, e.g., their response to COVID-19, impacts how managers understand job security, and thus affects their commitment to remain in their organizations. The findings showed that organizational action with regard to COVID-19 influences perceived job security and increases managers’ organizational commitment. Along the same line, Mao, He, Morrison and Coca-Stefaniak (2020) found that corporate social responsibility positively affected employee self-efficacy, optimism, and hope based on employee satisfaction with the business's response to COVID-19. Similarly, Kraus et al. (2020) found stronger solidarity and cohesion within national and international companies as well as increased digitalization. In an attempt to analyze how opening tourism businesses with restricted capacity might be achievable, Tsionas (2020) concluded that “reopening gradually requiring only nonnegative profits is quite feasible but reopening requiring the same level of profit as in the pre-COVID-19 period is considerably more difficult, and […] reopening at [a] capacity near 33% [seems feasible]”. These new forms of tourism management will be crucial to address growing tourist interest in sustainability and accessibility.

According to Sigala (2020) , to address tourists’ health and physical contact risks, tourist firms will need to include new cleaning and hygiene protocols, redesign consumer experiences, and rethink new business ecosystems and partnerships. Furthermore, tourist spaces and policymakers will have to encourage health passports and health identities. Collaborative projects may be pivotal to enable health professionals and tourism researchers to develop collaborative medical knowledge post-COVID-19 for reconstruction of the tourism sector. Such a strategy will allow for protection of the health and well-being of all tourism stakeholders, including consumers and workers. Ludvigsen and Hayton (2020) noted the relevance of such an interdisciplinary approach, which engages with the individual and social impacts associated with secure mega-event organizations.

To face the new technological challenges in the tourism sector, Sigala (2020) stated that tourism management will have to develop important updates and improvements on digital platforms, promote the use of artificial intelligence and online payment methods, and make ticket reservations more flexible. For example, the museum sector did not stop during the lockdown and went digital during COVID-19 (Angostino et al., 2020). Social media increased online initiatives and numbers of visitors.

6. Discussion

The current COVID-19 crisis placed tourism professionals and academics in the center of an information pandemic, as these industries are two of the hardest hit by the outbreak ( Hao et al., 2020 ). Although a great deal of research has assessed the effects of COVID-19 on the city development and tourism sectors, no study has assessed the increasing number of publications in the field of tourism and COVID-19 or the main research clusters that could be consolidated as a starting point for future studies on cities. Therefore, it is our aim to quantify this scientific production, clear up its main authors and scientific outlets, describe and visually display its most relevant research streams, and provide a research agenda for specialists in smart and sustainable cities. Consequently, this paper contributes to the existing literature on COVID-19 and sustainable cities, as it develops a critical examination of the current research and highlights the research gaps that must be filled by future studies. Particularly, a bibliometric analysis was conducted of publications on COVID-19 and tourism by means of SciMAT software to shed light on the current scope, features, and topics of interest with regard to the impact of COVID-19 on the tourism sector. The current paper makes headway in research on COVID-19 and tourism, as it presents a deep analysis of the research and proposes a way forward in tourism research and practice.

Regarding RQ1, the study revealed a corpus of 1303 manuscripts on COVID-19 and the hospitality and tourism sector published between 1 December 2019 and 31 March 2021 present in outlets indexed in WoS and Scopus. The bibliometric analysis addresses RQ2: publications related to hospitality are in journals such as International Journal of Hospitality Management and International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management . Other studies have appeared in publications such as Current Issues in Tourism, Tourism Geographies , and Journal of Sustainable Tourism . Following the results of Torres-Salinas (2020), our findings highlight that over 60% of articles on COVID-19 and tourism are open access. The findings of the content analysis answer RQ3 by highlighting nine main clusters of COVID-19 and tourism. Particularly, this study demonstrated that social media and smart tourism are driving themes with high potential for development and relevance in the tourism field in the new normal. The rise of digitalization and tourists’ interest in sustainable, accessible, and smart tourism justify the potential growth of both major clusters. The content analysis of this work also corroborates that, even if they are underdeveloped, sustainable tourism and tourist risk perception are topics of enormous relevance in the new form of tourism management that both companies and academics should consider in the near future. Academic work emphasizes that the future development of the hospitality and tourism sectors should encourage sustainability and social growth, consideration of all stakeholders (with a special emphasis on communities of origin), and the application of technology and digitalization to the supply of services in smart city environments. Academia has used the major theme of public health in the field of tourism as an intersectional axis, since it constitutes one of the main drivers of attitudes, intentions, and behaviors in tourist destinations in the new normal. Finally, the most developed topic in the field of tourism and hospitality after COVID-19, although of little relevance, is the economic impact of the pandemic on the tourism sector. Academics in the tourism industry have assessed the effects of COVID-19 on the performance of restaurants, airports, art recreation, hotels, and cruise ships, as well as the decline in demand in these sectors.

In order to identify the forms of tourism, tourism management, and tourist behavior that will gain comparatively more importance at the global level in the new normal after COVID-19 (RQ4), the current research further developed an empirical review of the selected studies. Particularly, building upon the theoretical framework of the impacts of micro- and macro-environmental factors on tourism management, we analyzed how COVID-19, a macro-environmental factor, has affected other macro-environmental forces (such as economics, social movements, and tourism-related lifestyles) and micro-environmental forces (such as modifications in tourist behavior), as well as the effects of these two major types of drivers on changes in tourism management ( Mhlanga, 2019 ; Polo-Peña et al., 2012; Wang & Ap, 2013 ). The results not only allow us to classify the main thematic axes established above into tourism research domains, but also help us to identify potential research avenues in the field of tourism management in the future. Fig. 8 presents the identified issues and the corresponding research questions to be addressed.

Main knowledge domains corresponding to research questions. .

Particularly, the intersectional and highly developed thematic axes have been addressed in studies that analyze the effects of COVID-19 on other macro-environmental factors of tourism companies, such as the social and economic consequences to the tourism industry, structural modifications in global tourism demand, and government measures in the tourism sector. However, the indirect effects of tourism industry losses on supporting sectors (such as hospitality, museums, travel insurance, and overnight stays) have hardly been investigated. Future research should delve deeper into the changes in the pricing structure in the tourism sector after COVID-19 and the most efficient types of institutional support for the reconstruction of the sector.

Most of the research has focused on the thematic areas previously referred to as motor themes (social media and smart tourism/smart cities) as well as emerging ones (sustainable tourism, consumer behavior, and tourist risk perception), all of which are related to the effects of COVID-19 on the most relevant micro-environmental factor, tourist behavior. Specifically, the literature has identified six fast-growing trends in tourist behavior in the new normal: sustainability, interest in the local, technology, and smart cities, luxury services, hygiene protocols, and tourism emotions. Although previous research looked into the future of these new forms of tourism and consumer behavior ( Grilli, Tyllianakis, Luisetti, Ferrini & Turner, 2021 ; Iloranta, 2019 ; Pasquinelli & Trunfio, 2020 ), prospective investigations are well positioned to reanalyze the presence of new competitors in the new normal (such as sparsely inhabited cities, mountain-related firms, or businesses that personalize and individualize tourist services) and understand tourists’ attitudes, use, adoption, and satisfaction regarding these emerging forms. Previous studies in the field of tourism management ( Liberato et al., 2018 or Bastidas-Manzano, (2020) evaluated tourist preferences and behaviors with regard to technological and sustainable environments. Nevertheless, the emergence of COVID-19 should further encourage analyses of the influence of ICT, IoT, and Big Data on the spread of COVID-19 in the tourism context; explore the effects of technological developments on the environment, populations, and local economies (e.g., Gilliland, Sanchirico & Taylor, 2020 ); better understand the drawbacks and advantages of adopting digital and artificial intelligence in the hospitality and tourism industries; and create labels or classifications of tourism destinations based on how smart they are (i.e., considering their use of technology, accessibility, sustainability, and participatory governance). Future studies should also analyze the impact of each of dimension of smart city projects—participatory governance, sustainability, accessibility, and social economy—on the prevention, control, and spread of COVID-19 ( S. Yang & Chong, 2021 ). Prospective studies should also focus on how the COVID-19 pandemic altered the images of particular destinations and how consumers alter their decisions in light of the pandemic. Future research should also follow the path set out by Arbolino, Boffardi, De Simone and Ioppolo (2021) for sustainability planning and management in tourism. Such research could also follow the guidelines set by Lozano-Oyola, Blancas, González and Caballero (2019) to objectively improve sustainability indices at tourist destinations. Amid this resetting of the tourism sector, Prayag (2020) recognizes the resilience of companies and consumers as a key driver of prospective research related to COVID-19.

Importantly, the growth in relevance of tourists’ emotional states justifies the use of psychological and neural tools (such as eye tracking or electroencephalography) to better understand their perceived risk and emotional drivers during and after the COVID-19 pandemic (Ramsoy et al., T. Z., 2019 ). Recent studies confirm that the emotional component of the tourist experience is more dynamic than the cognitive one (based on perceptions and beliefs) and captures experiences to a greater extent. Indeed, Wang et al. (2020) suggest that the ultimate purpose of the tourist experience is to seek reward, and its basic level of expression is affection and emotion, which are antecedents of tourist decision-making. Accordingly, future investigations in this regard could be categorized in the branch known as consumer neuroscience, “the study of the neural conditions and processes that underlie consumption, their psychological meaning, and their behavioral consequences” ( Bastiaansen et al., 2018 ). There is already some research in this area, such as studies by Ramsoy et al. ( T. Z., 2019 ), Bastiaansen et al. (2018) , and Li, Huang and Christianson (2016) .

Although not extensively, there is research underway evaluating the effects of macro- and micro-environments on tourism management. According to the analyzed studies, in order to cope with the increase in the above-mentioned typologies of tourism and the new tourist profile post-COVID-19, tourism firms will first need to change their traditional management paths and address the health and physical contact concerns of tourists, encourage the use of health passports and health identities, and develop collaborative projects to enable health professionals and tourism researchers to implement collaborative medical knowledge post-COVID-19. Second, tourism companies and institutions must reduce the risk of visiting their destinations by implementing measures such as flexible booking, virtual visits, accelerated digital data analytics, trustworthy payment environments, and visually appealing search platforms. Third, tourism companies need to integrate sustainability and corporate social responsibility as strategic elements in their entire value proposition: focusing on recycling strategies, encouraging renewable energies, and monitoring the impact of tourism activities will make a difference. This will lead to not only accessible and low-polluting tourist services, but also global collaboration to face climate change and environmental problems and make a strong commitment to retain and value workers.

Theoretically, this study represents an advance in the lines of research and management in the field of tourism and cities derived from COVID-19. Earlier studies in the field of sustainability and tourism bibliometrically analyzed the relevance of multidisciplinary studies on COVID-19 in tourism ( Wen et al., 2020 ) and human mobility behavior in cities during the pandemic (Benita, 2021), and the impacts and implications of resetting research and international sectors have been specified ( Farzanegan et al., 2020 ; Sigala, 2020 ; Škare et al., 2020). In order to analyze the effects of COVID-19 on environmental levels in cities, other research has clarified the impacts of COVID-19 on improved indoor air quality (Benita, 2021) or prevention and treatment methods and effective parameters ( Rahmani & Mirmahaleh, 2021 ). Our study constitutes a step forward in this respect, as it clarifies for the first time the importance and development potential of the above-mentioned topics for the future of cities and the tourism sector. In addition to identifying the most relevant authors, journals, and articles in the discipline, we concluded that social media and smart cities and tourism are the motor themes with the greatest potential; sustainable cities, local destination development, changes in tourist behavior, and tourists’ risk perception are underdeveloped streams with enormous relevance and potential for growth in the new normal. The effects of COVID-19 on citizen health and its economic effects on the tourism industry and cities are intersectional and highly developed topics, although of little relevance. Interestingly, our findings provide insight into the challenges and questions that sustainable cities research should answer in the new normal along diverse lines, such as macro-environmental factors (economy, travel, prices, and workforce), micro-environmental factors (consumer behavior, sustainability, technology, and hygiene protocols), and future management and city decisions.

It is worth noting that the current study only made use of research work indexed in the Scopus and WoS databases and did not assess all published materials. We did not consider preprints. Although unreviewed versions of articles represent a rapid advance in knowledge, it is precisely the lack of external and independent control that limits their contribution to tourism research. In fact, relying on preprints could lead to erroneous decisions by organizations and government institutions in the management of tourism. Even though we used a well-established and robust tool (SciMAT) and perspective in the area of social sciences to represent the density and centrality in the strategic diagram (e.g., Díaz-López, Carpio, Martín-Morales & Zamorano, 2019 ; Sepulcri, Mainardes & Marchiori, 2020 ), future research should corroborate the current conclusions by using Graph Theory, a math technique for studying graphs, with high applicability in the field of human brain networks (e.g., F. V. Farahani, Karwowski & Lighthall, 2019 ).

7. Conclusions

Despite the rapid increase in the number of publications on COVID-19 and city development, it is surprising that no research has developed a synthesis of this increase. The present study constitutes the first bibliometric study to identify the main topics of interest, authors, and journals that are worth considering for the future of tourism research. Our findings revealed that social media and smart tourism are the themes with the greatest potential; sustainable cities, local destination development, changes in tourist behavior, and tourists’ risk perception are underdeveloped streams with enormous relevance and growth in the new normal. Research on the effects of COVID-19 on citizen health and its economic impact on the tourism industry and cities are intersectional and highly developed topics, although of little relevance. Furthermore, we identified the challenges of future city development, tourism research and practice, and we proposed future directions for research on city and tourism management in the new normal. City planners and tourism managers should take advantage of such results to design more sustainable, local and smart cities.

Declaration of Competing Interest

Acknowledgements.

This study was supported by an Excellence Project awarded by the Junta de Andalusia [REF: B-SEJ-220-UGR18] and by a grant from the Fundación Ramón Areces [CISP18A6208]. Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Granada / CBUA.

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After a pandemic, flyers are facing a ‘new normal’ for travel

T ravelers who sought vengeance after the pandemic halted plans for over a year have already rescheduled and gone on those trips, but now are looking to venture out to their next destination, according to travel experts.

After two years of travelers making up for lost time during the pandemic, leisure travel has finally reached a “new normal” and travelers are looking to head to new places. The days of revenge travel, or traveling because lockdowns and pandemic restrictions canceled plans back in 2020, are over — at least that’s what travel experts say.

In turn, travelers will see airfares that look similar or even less than what they paid in 2019.

Workplace flexibility enables leisure travel, thus decreasing revenge travel and the ongoing pent-up demand. He said there’s still a high desire to head out and experience a new place, said Matt Soderberg, U.S. airline practice leader at Deloitte.

“It’s not just, ‘Hey, I want to go book a trip to a hotel,’” he said. “They’re also looking for excursions and experiences while on that trip.”

In 2021, half of summer travelers were looking to “escape after lockdowns,” according to Deloitte’s latest travel industry outlook . That continued into 2022 and early 2023, but declined by the 2023 holiday season, as 11% of people said they were making up trips. Despite this, travel remains hotter than ever looking ahead into the year.

Hayley Berg, senior economist at Hopper said airfares will look a lot like what was available before the pandemic. Internationally, in regions where capacity has come back fully, like Europe, Mexico, Central America, prices will stay the same until there are significant changes. Those changes could be pre-pandemic changes that airlines monitored, increased competition, lower fuel costs, new entrants to the market or an airline expanding service.

“For Europe, for example, depending on where you’re going airfares are a little bit elevated in most of the major cities like London, Paris, Rome, Athens, you’ll see airfares that are probably still above 2019 levels, but far down from those incredible highs that we had seen the last couple of years,” Berg said. “Asia remains the exception...Those are routes, Trans-Pacific, that are still recovering capacity parts of Asia in particular, so prices remain very inflated there compared to pre-pandemic.”

Demand for international travel remains high, Berg said. Last year, travelers flocked to destinations all over the world, despite higher airfares and hospitality expenses. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics , the national average for domestic airfare was $367.79 in the third quarter of last year. For that same quarter of 2019, the average was $345.09.

“Demand remains strong, and we have seen robust bookings to start the year, as travel trends have begun to normalize across entities,” said Robert Isom, CEO of American Airlines in the air carrier’s latest earnings call.

In 2023, American and its regional partners flew almost 2 million flights, with an average load factor of 83.5%, producing a historic “best-ever” fourth quarter and full-year completion factor. The Fort Worth-based airline also reported the lowest number of cancellations annually since the merger with U.S. Airways in 2013. American reported an $822 million profit in 2023 with a record revenue of $53 billion .

Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan shared that same sentiment in the Dallas-based air carrier’s latest earnings call, stating the air carrier is pleased with the “core demand” for its product. Southwest reported a 78.2% load factor in its last earnings call.

“We saw close-in performance strengthen in November and December for both leisure and corporate travel,” Jordan told investors. “This led fourth quarter 2023 to be yet another record at just over $6.8 billion in operating revenue, and we are seeing that strength continue into 2024.”

On the flip side, employers have dramatically changed post-pandemic workspaces with remote and hybrid offices here to say, according to Deloitte. Soderberg called it the “laptop luggers” that will take work with them for these vacations or other excursions during the year. According to a report from Gallup, in 2019, 60% of remote-capable employees spent their week working in person. That number fell to 20% in 2023.

All the while, corporate travel continues to rebound, but gains are decelerating, Deloitte reported.

However, U.S. corporate travel spending is likely to surpass pre-pandemic levels within the next year. According to the Global Business Travel Association’s Business Travel Index Outlook report released last summer, spending will speed up to $1.8 trillion by 2027.

Fort Worth-based American remains “very encouraged” by business travel, Isom told investors. Domestic revenues from business travel ended the fourth quarter at 90% of 2019 levels, American reported.

Looking ahead to March, Spring Break will be a focal point for air carriers. According to Hopper, 90% of those traveling this spring say price and affordability are top of mind. Berg said 83% of travelers who are taking a spring break trip plan to fly to their destination. This year, airfare for vacations in March and April is averaging $256 per round-trip domestic ticket, down 2% from this time last year and 11% lower than 2019 prices.

Soderberg said this year will depend on “how economics play out” — if travelers can even afford to make big trips.

Domestic travel is back to pre-pandemic levels, and slightly below in some cases.

“I do think there’s a bit of a new normal and I think the data is starting to show what that new normal will look like,” Soderberg said.

©2024 The Dallas Morning News. Visit dallasnews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

How tourist operators in Far North Queensland are fighting for survival after series of disasters

For three months, Julian and Jackie Pagani have been burning hundreds of litres of fuel a day to power a campsite no-one can visit.

Usually their camping ground at Cape Tribulation, nestled between World Heritage-listed rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef, swells with visitors this time of year.

But since Cyclone Jasper and a subsequent flooding event wreaked havoc on Far North Queensland last December, no-one has been able to get into the remote coastal village.

There's only one road into Cape Tribulation, and it's impassable.

"We haven't had any tourist trade since the cyclone so we are three months in with no income, no trade," Ms Pagani said.

"We don't know where to go from here, we don't know when we can reopen the doors, we don't know what to tell our staff, we don't know what to tell the bank."

Cape Tribulation has no mains power so for the Paganis, powering the campground is an expense that doesn't stop — even if the tourists do.

"[The diesel generator is] burning hundreds of litres of fuel a day because we have to keep everything on, including our sewage treatment plant," Mr Pagani said.

"After three months, it's a lot of money without an income."

Other tourism operators in the close-knit rainforest community are also doing it tough. The hotel rooms are vacant and cafes are empty, leaving businesses in the region teetering on the edge of financial ruin.

Ms Pagani puts it plainly: "Without tourists, we don't have Cape Tribulation."

"It won't exist if we don't open to tourists, there's no other way to make an income here, all other residents work in tourism."

A 'horrific start' to the tourism year

It's been three months since Cyclone Jasper and a subsequent flooding event wreaked havoc on Far North Queensland — the jewel in Australia's tourism crown.

About $280 million has been lost in cancelled bookings across the region between December and January and hotel occupancy rates remain as low as 30 per cent in some areas.

"We've had an horrific start to the year," Queensland's Tourism Minister Michael Healy conceded.

About 400,000 tourists normally visit the Daintree Rainforest and Cape Tribulation, located about a three-hour drive north of Cairns, each year.

The region recorded almost 3 metres of rain after Jasper crossed the coast near Cape Tribulation and the deluge caused a 56-metre landslide that effectively severed the rainforest village from the rest of the state.

Locals band together

Despite the devastation, Ms Pagani said local businesses had joined forces to help her pull off the couple's wedding on New Year's Eve at their isolated campground – the only business the town has seen in three months

About 170 family and friends were ferried in on a commercial reef tourism boat, cutlery and dinnerware was borrowed from nearby resorts, and food and drinks purchased from local businesses.

"We had planned our wedding a long time ago and we weren't going to let the cyclone stop us," Ms Pagani said.

Lawrence Mason, who runs a café and shop at Cape Tribulation, supplied alcohol, soft drinks and water for the wedding.

"We've been closed for more than 90 days so it was wonderful to see locals supporting other locals at such a difficult time," he said.

Empty rooms and water woes

Even parts of Far North Queensland that are accessible to visitors are still feeling the pain months after the cyclone.

Bryce and Lee Tozer, who manage the Cayman Villas resort in Port Douglas — a destination favoured by US presidents and singers Kylie Minogue and Ed Sheeran — said their occupancy rates were "significantly down" this Easter.

"I've spoken to many people around town and we all have similar stories, the phones aren't running hot, " Mr Bryce said.

"We need to get the message out, especially to people in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane that we are here and open, the reef is here, all the resorts are open for business, all sitting here and waiting for you to come."

Mr Tozer said publicity surrounding the town's water woes — Port Douglas is on level-four water restrictions as a result of flooding damage to treatment plants — had also impacted visitor numbers.

There have been several instances where the town has been left without water at short notice, forcing some tourists to bucket pool water to flush their toilets.

Local mayor Michael Kerr said council was working through the water issues and restoring road access to Cape Tribulation with the help of the Department of Transport and Main Roads.

"It's important to remember we are still open for business. The bars, cafes, restaurants, the reef tours, they are all open and if you love the tropics, please come and see us," Mr Kerr said.

He said the council hoped to open the road into Cape Tribulation by Easter, but it would be weather-dependent.

Millions poured into lure visitors back

Both the Queensland and federal governments have poured millions of dollars into advertising campaigns, discounted flights and holiday vouchers in a bid to entice visitors back to Far North Queensland.

In Cairns and Port Douglas, occupancy rates this Easter period have been about half of what they were last year, Tourism Tropical North Queensland (TTNQ) figures show.

Mr Healy said in addition to the cyclone, flooding and road closures, there were other factors that had also contributed to the region's poor tourist numbers.

"Fundamentally, this comes down to access, and if we're looking at aviation into the region, and the prices are high, that is a big deterrent," he said.

"Eighty-seven per cent of our tourists get off at the [Cairns] airport so pricing, especially around that holiday period, is very important."

However, a sprinkling of international tourists have found their way to the region despite the hurdles.

English visitor Paul Oakley said he and his wife were aware of the natural disasters but chose to forge ahead with their journey and hadn't been disappointed.

"If you're helping out the tourism here, it's a really good thing and we are pleased that we did come," Mr Oakley said.

"We had expectations about what Australia would be like and it has more than exceeded those. Queensland in particular is beautiful. We have had trips to the Great Barrier Reef and it has just been wonderful."

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How quickly is tourism recovering from COVID-19?

The pandemic helped fuel a decline in tourism globally. Image:  Unsplash/Markus Spiske

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Stay up to date:, travel and tourism.

• Tourists spent an extra 1.8 billion nights in the European Union in 2021 compared with the year before.
• But this is still almost 40% lower than pre-pandemic levels, according to EU statistics.
• Tourism is an important sector for the world economy, and is expected to continue recovering gradually in 2022.
• However, there are still risks – including Russia's invasion of Ukraine and COVID-19 variants.

Tourism was hit particularly hard by the pandemic, as lockdowns restricted people to travelling around their homes and neighbourhoods rather than around the world. But there are now signs that tourist numbers are starting to recover as limitations on movement are eased.

There was a 27% rise in nights spent at EU tourist accommodation in 2021 , according to Eurostat, the statistical office of the EU. This took the total to 1.8 billion, although this was still 37% less than in 2019, before COVID-19.

The first global pandemic in more than 100 years, COVID-19 has spread throughout the world at an unprecedented speed. At the time of writing, 4.5 million cases have been confirmed and more than 300,000 people have died due to the virus.

As countries seek to recover, some of the more long-term economic, business, environmental, societal and technological challenges and opportunities are just beginning to become visible.

To help all stakeholders – communities, governments, businesses and individuals understand the emerging risks and follow-on effects generated by the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Marsh and McLennan and Zurich Insurance Group, has launched its COVID-19 Risks Outlook: A Preliminary Mapping and its Implications - a companion for decision-makers, building on the Forum’s annual Global Risks Report.

Companies are invited to join the Forum’s work to help manage the identified emerging risks of COVID-19 across industries to shape a better future. Read the full COVID-19 Risks Outlook: A Preliminary Mapping and its Implications report here , and our impact story with further information.

Where tourists went

Greece, Spain and Croatia saw the biggest rises in visitors last year, with the number of nights spent at tourist accommodation jumping by more than 70%. Trips to Austria, Latvia and Slovakia fell, but by less than 18%.

“This shows signs of recovery in the tourism sector,” Eurostat says.

However, when 2021 tourist night numbers are compared with 2019, it shows some countries lost more than half their bookings. Latvia, Slovakia, Malta and Hungary were the worst hit.

Denmark and the Netherlands, on the other hand, were the least affected countries. They saw drops of less than 20% in nights spent in tourist accommodation.

Eurostat says the figures are “far less dramatic” than the contrast between 2019 and 2020, when tourism in the EU halved .

Tourism supports jobs

More than 2 million businesses – mostly small and medium-sized companies – make up the EU’s tourism industry , according to the European Parliament.

These firms employ an estimated 12.3 million people, but worker numbers increase to 27.3 million when related sectors are taken into account.

Across the EU in 2018, travel and tourism made up about 4% of GDP – the total value of products and services produced in a country – or 10% if closely related sectors are taken into account.

Three-quarters of these tourism businesses operated in either accommodation or serving food and drink. Italy, France, Spain and Germany were home to 55% of the EU’s tourism firms in 2018.

Have you read?

This is how the covid-19 crisis has affected international tourism, we urgently need to kickstart tourism’s recovery but crisis offers an opportunity to rethink it, a new era of sustainable travel prepares for take-off, global growth and risks.

Tourism is the world’s third-biggest export sector , according to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), a special United Nations agency.

Because of COVID-19, tourism lost out on around $1 trillion of export revenues in 2021, UNWTO estimates. It predicts that the tourism industry will recover gradually in 2022 .

International tourist arrivals globally grew 130% in January 2022, UNWTO says. And this was despite the Omicron variant of COVID-19 slowing down the speed of the recovery.

The war in Ukraine also poses a new risk to the global tourism industry – by potentially disrupting the return of confidence to travel, UNWTO says.

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World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

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International Tourism to Reach Pre-Pandemic Levels in 2024

• All Regions
• 19 Jan 2024

Following a strong 2023, international tourism is well on track to return to pre-pandemic levels in 2024.

According to the first UNWTO World Tourism Barometer of the year, international tourism ended 2023 at 88% of pre-pandemic levels , with an estimated 1.3 billion international arrivals . The unleashing of remaining pent-up demand, increased air connectivity, and a stronger recovery of Asian markets and destinations, are expected to underpin a full recovery by the end of 2024.

Middle East, Europe and Africa performed strongest in 2023

The latest UNWTO World Tourism Barometer provides a comprehensive overview of the sector's performance in 2023, tracking recovery by global region, sub-region and destination. Key takeaways include:

• The Middle East led recovery in relative terms as the only region to overcome pre-pandemic levels with arrivals 22% above 2019.
• Europe , the world's most visited region, reached 94% of 2019 levels, supported by intra-regional demand and travel from the United States.
• Africa recovered 96% of pre-pandemic visitors and Americas reached 90%.
• Asia and the Pacific reached 65% of pre-pandemic levels following the reopening of several markets and destinations. However, performance is mixed, with South Asia already recovering 87% of 2019 levels and North-East Asia around 55%. 

International Tourist Arrivals (% change over 2019)

Available data shows several destinations, including both large, established destinations as well as small and emerging ones, reporting double-digit growth in international arrivals in 2023 when compared to 2019. Four sub-regions exceeded their 2019 arrival levels: Southern Mediterranean Europe, Caribbean, Central America and North Africa.

UNWTO Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili says: "The latest UNWTO data underscores tourism's resilience and rapid recovery, with pre-pandemic numbers expected by the end of 2024. The rebound is already having a significant impact on economies, jobs, growth and opportunities for communities everywhere. These numbers also recall the critical task of progressing sustainability and inclusion in tourism development"

International tourism hit US$1.4 trillion in 2023

The latest UNWTO data also highlights the economic impact of recovery.

• International tourism receipts reached USD 1.4 trillion in 2023 according to preliminary estimates, about 93% of the USD 1.5 trillion earned by destinations in 2019.
• Total export revenues from tourism (including passenger transport) are estimated at USD 1.6 trillion in 2023, almost 95% of the USD 1.7 trillion recorded in 2019.
• Preliminary estimates on the economic contribution of tourism, measured in tourism direct gross domestic product (TDGDP) point to USD 3.3 trillion in 2023, or 3% of global GDP. This indicates a recovery of pre-pandemic TDGDP driven by strong domestic and international tourism.

Several destinations reported strong growth in international tourism receipts during the first ten to twelve months of 2023, exceeding in some cases growth in arrivals. Strong demand for outbound travel was also reported by several large source markets this period, with many exceeding 2019 levels.

The sustained recovery is also reflected in the performance of industry indicators. According to the UNWTO Tourism Recovery Tracker, both international air capacity and passenger demand recovered about 90% of pre-pandemic levels through October 2023 (IATA). Global occupancy rates in accommodation establishments reached 65% in November, slightly above 62% in November 2022 (based on STR data).

Looking Ahead to 2024

International tourism is expected to fully recover pre-pandemic levels in 2024, with initial estimates pointing to 2% growth above 2019 levels. This central forecast by UNWTO remains subject to the pace of recovery in Asia and to the evolution of existing economic and geopolitical downside risks.  

The positive outlook is reflected in the latest UNWTO Tourism Confidence Index survey, with 67% of tourism professionals indicating better or much better prospects for 2024 compared to 2023. Some 28% expect similar performance, while only 6% expect tourism performance in 2024 to be worse than last year. Key considerations include:

• There is still significant room for recovery across Asia. The reopening of several source markets and destinations will boost recovery in the region and globally.
• Chinese outbound and inbound tourism is expected to accelerate in 2024, due to visa facilitation and improved air capacity. China is applying visa-free travel for citizens of France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Malaysia for a year to 30 November 2024.
• Visa and travel facilitation measures will promote travel to and around the Middle East and Africa with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to implement a unified tourist visa, similar to the Schengen visa, and measures to facilitate intra-African travel in Kenya and Rwanda.
• Europe is expected to drive results again in 2024. In March, Romania and Bulgaria will join the Schengen area of free movement, and Paris will host the Summer Olympics in July and August.
• Strong travel from the United States, backed by a strong US dollar, will continue to benefit destinations in the Americas and beyond. As in 2023, robust source markets in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, will continue to fuel tourism flows and spending around the world.
• Economic and geopolitical headwinds continue to pose significant challenges to the sustained recovery of international tourism and confidence levels. Persisting inflation, high interest rates, volatile oil prices and disruptions to trade can continue to impact transport and accommodations costs in 2024.
• Against this backdrop, tourists are expected to increasingly seek value for money and travel closer to home. Sustainable practices and adaptability will also play an increasing role in consumer choice. 
• Staff shortages remain a critical issue, as tourism businesses face a shortfall in labor to cope with high demand.
• The evolution of the Hamas-Israel conflict may disrupt travel in the Middle East and impact traveler confidence. Uncertainty derived from the Russian aggression against Ukraine as well as other mounting geopolitical tensions, continue to weigh on confidence.

Related links

• Download the News Release on PDF
• World Tourism Barometer | EXCERPT | Volume 22 • Issue 1 • January 2024
• World Tourism Barometer | PPT Version | Volume 22 • Issue 1 • January 2024
• UNWTO Tourism Recovery Tracker
• UNWTO World Tourism Barometer
• UNWTO Tourism Data Dashboard

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