Hospitality and Tourism Research During Global Instability: A BERTopic Analysis

Abstract

Hospitality and tourism represent the sector most affected by global disruptions caused by pandemics, energy crises, or political disturbances. In this paper authors examine how instability shapes research priorities and responses in hospitality and tourism research between 2019 and 2023, a period characterized by global pandemics. Topic modelling is utilized as the main method applied on abstracts of 1,100 scientific publications from this domain. These publications are collected from Web of Science and Scopus citation databases. Topic modelling, a natural language processing technique, uncovers hidden thematic structures in large text collections and corpora. This study utilized BERTopic to uncover research topics studied within an observed time interval. BERTopic uncovered 23 dominant topics in hospitality and tourism research, which emerged during the pre-crisis, crisis, and the adaptation period. Most prominent topics discovered include customer experience and review, energy systems modelling, consumption, brand loyalty and satisfaction and destination image and behavior.