Resilience for Hospitality and Tourism Enterprises: A Review and Directions for Future Research

Abstract

The sustainability of tourism destinations is highly dependent on an innovative and thriving tourism sector comprised predominantly of small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs). Such businesses are the economic engines of many regional and rural communities and are pivotal in providing the essential services of accommodations, attractions, and experiences. As post-COVID-19 recovery takes hold, national borders reopen and tourism rebounds, rethinking the sustainability and resilience of such tourism businesses has become essential. Tourism businesses need to be not only responsive or reactive in the aftermath of disaster events, but to structure themselves in a way that strengthens their resilience. This study systematically evaluates existing literature on hospitality and tourism SMEs and resilience using bibliometric analysis to synthesise existing knowledge, identify major developments, themes, and issues, and stimulate future research. A lexical network analysis identifies five interrelated clusters of research themes within the extant literature on tourism and resilience, providing a comprehensive framework to help understand the corpus of knowledge on this important domain, while a temporal analysis facilitates an understanding of how these themes have developed over time, helping to identify developing research themes and gaps in the literature. A major gap identified is the lack of integration of sustainability as a research topic into the existing knowledge network on business resilience and tourism. This study also outlined insights for academia, practitioners, tourism marketers, developers, and policymakers.