Medical, health and wellness tourism and travel represent a dynamic and rapidly growing multi-disciplinary economic activity and field of knowledge. This research responds to earlier calls to integrate research on travel medicine and tourism. It critically reviews the literature published on these topics over a 50-year period (1970 to 2020) using CiteSpace software. Some 802 articles were gathered and analyzed from major databases including the Web of Science and Scopus. Markets (demand and behavior), destinations (development and promotion), and development environments (policies and impacts) emerged as the main three research themes in medical-health-wellness tourism. Medical-health-wellness tourism will integrate with other care sectors and become more embedded in policy-making related to sustainable development, especially with regards to quality of life initiatives. A future research agenda for medical-health-tourism is discussed.

The present study examined the perception, reaction (i.e., possible measures), and future development from the perspectives of hotel and tourism practitioners and experts to investigate the influence of coronavirus disease 2019 (i.e., COVID-19) on the hospitality and tourism industry in China. After conducting 58 in-depth interviews among hotel and tourism practitioners and experts, feasible and practical measures were proposed to reduce such influence and predict the future development of China’s hospitality and tourism industry. Findings indicate that the influence of COVID-19 on the industry is perceived mainly through the pandemic’s economic and social effects. Possible measures that can be adopted for the recovery of China’s hospitality and tourism industry include the following aspects: government financial support, employee relationship management and electronic (e)-training, business marketing management, and industry co-operation network. A Perception-Reaction-Predication (PRP) crisis model is also proposed.

To systematically understand the evolution of health tourism in China, the present study visually analyzes the theme evolution and frontiers of Chinese health tourism research on the basis of the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database through bibliometric analysis. The findings reflect the existence of diverse clustering themes in health tourism research, and the formation time of each theme is different. The findings also indicate that the change in the theme is led by government policy. Theoretically, the findings of the present study can, on the one hand, contribute to the health tourism literature by comprehensively exploring and summarizing the themes and topics of health tourism development in China since its appearance (i.e., 1981), and, on the other hand, provide references for future health tourism exploration directions. Findings of the present study can provide references for effective future development directions of the health tourism industry.

Identifying the tourist flow of a destination can promote the development of travel-related products and effective destination marketing. Nevertheless, tourist inflows and outflows have only received limited attention from previous studies. Hence, this study visualizes the tourist flow of Tibet through social network analysis to bridge the aforementioned gap. Findings show that the Lhasa prefecture is the transportation hub of Tibet. Tourist flow in the eastern part of Tibet is generally stronger than that in the western part. Moreover, the tourist flow pattern identified mainly includes “(diverse or balanced) diffusion from the main center”, “clustering to the main center”, and “diffusion from a clustered circle”.

Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has had a huge impact on the global tourism industry over the past couple of years. Most previous studies investigated tourism crises after the pandemic period. Hence, to minimize the research gap, the present study investigates the impact of COVID-19 on tourism during the pandemic period. By assessing this impact, this paper proposes a D (big data) I (impact module) S (strategy module) E (evaluation module) model to cope with the crisis in order to bring about feasible implications for tourism practitioners and governments. This paper is to provide real-time destination management adjustments. This model is based on a crisis management framework and governance theory through retrieving big data from China Unicom and major travel information delivery sources. The major finding shows that the detailed time points of pandemic information release in the early stage of crisis. In conclusion, through proposing a DISE model, the present study assesses the impact of the major emergency public health crisis, assists destination managers in adjusting tourism-related policy and reflects the priority of recovering tourism after the crisis for effective tourist destination management.