The Coronavirus Pandemic – A Critical Discussion of a Tourism Research Agenda

New article on The Coronavirus Pandemic – A Critical Discussion of a Tourism Research Agenda      in Journal of Tourism Management, Volume 81, 104164 (2020) 

by Professor (with special responsibilities) Sebastian Zenker & Associate Professor Florian Kock

Highlights

• The coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic is one of the most impactful disasters of the 21st century
• However, in tourism we know already quite a lot about crises and disasters.
• For future research, we should therefore not focus on the obvious and simply descriptive.
• We illustrate six future research paths, informed by the current pandemic.
• We also discuss where existing knowledge might be subject to a paradigm-shift.

Abstract

Unquestionable, the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic is one of the most impactful events of the 21st century and has tremendous effects on tourism. While many tourism researchers worldwide are currently ‘Covid-19 research gap spotting’, we call for more deliberateness and rigor. While we agree that the coronavirus pandemic is unique and relevant to research, we argue that not all effects are worth researching or novel to us. Previous research on crises and disasters do show similar patterns and existing theories can often very well explain the current phenomena. Thus, six illustrative examples are shown how a research agenda could look like. This includes parts where theoretical explanations from tourism are missing, as well as where we think existing knowledge might be subject to a tourism paradigm-shift due to the coronavirus pandemicd 

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