Tourism marketing research: Past, present and future

Abstract

This paper creates a Tourism Marketing Knowledge Grid and uses it as a framework for the review. The grid reveals that extant tourism marketing research has primarily focused on how service promises are made and kept, and has mostly generated frameworks to improve managerial decision making or provided insights about associations between constructs. Strategic principles, underpinned by the understanding of cause-effect relationships, are rare. These findings point to exciting opportunities for future research, including increased attention on enabling promises made to tourists and development of strategic and research principles; increased use of experimental, quasi-experimental and longitudinal research designs, as well as unstructured qualitative designs; and an increased focus on the study of actual behavior.