Surviving the storm: A bibliometric analysis of crisis marketing in tourism

The tourism and hospitality industry is inherently vulnerable to crises triggered by health emergencies, economic shocks, natural disasters, and geopolitical instability. While extensive research has addressed crisis management, the marketing dimension of crisis response, referred to here as crisis marketing, has accumulated a substantial empirical base yet remains conceptually fragmented and lacking in definitional consensus. Using Biblioshiny interface of the R Bibliometrix package, the study presents a bibliometric analysis of 253 Scopus-indexed publications from 1991 to 2025 to map the intellectual evolution, thematic structure, and emerging themes of crisis marketing in tourism and hospitality. The analysis identifies key authors, institutions, and journals shaping the field, highlights major conceptual clusters, and traces thematic shifts. The findings highlight the growing scholarly attention to crisis marketing as a rapidly growing body of research in tourism, particularly in response to disruptions such as pandemics, natural disasters, and geopolitical events. Rather than establishing crisis marketing as a fully distinct theoretical domain, this study provides a systematic empirical mapping that reveals the thematic structure of the field and identifies opportunities for future conceptual development. To move beyond description, the study also proposes a two-dimensional organizing framework, defined by temporal orientation (reactive to proactive) and marketing-mix breadth (communicative to full mix), that positions existing work and locates the conceptual frontier of the field. This study underscores the strategic importance of crisis marketing for resilience and recovery in tourism.