How does COVID-19 differ from previous crises? A comparative study of health-related crisis research in the tourism and hospitality context

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