The COVID-19 pandemic has entailed an unprecedented health crisis with significant economic impacts in many sectors worldwide. The tourism sector has been one of the most affected, with significant impacts on the number of cancelled reservations, a decrease in international travel and changes in consumption behaviour. This study aims to analyse the main changes in promotion and marketing in the tourism sector in Spain after the pandemic. To this end, a qualitative analysis was carried out via questionnaire-based interviews with 65 experts in the areas of marketing, consumer behaviour and tourism. The main findings show that online information sources gained weight over consulting friends and relatives, and a great advance in digitization is expected, where physical travel agencies will be displaced by online platforms, except for specialized and advisory services. Additionally, technologies such as virtual reality (VR) or artificial intelligence (AI) may play an increasingly important role in the medium term.

In the post-Covid-19 era, tourism impacts and the role played by sustainable planning on the long-term success of destinations have gained renewed importance. Understanding the image and perceptions tourists hold of a destination is vital for tourism planning, as they play a key role in tourists’ decisions. Considering the importance of these two key concepts (perceptions and sustainability), the present paper contributes to the advancement of knowledge on sustainable tourism by characterizing the state of the art of Sustainability Perceptions in Tourism and Hospitality (SPTH). To this end, the scientific literature on the topic was mapped through a combination of three bibliometric analysis techniques, namely: evaluative, relational, and systematic bibliometric analysis. These were based on productivity and impact indicators, including SciVal topic prominence. The results reveal that sustainability perceptions in SPTH focus on tourists’, stakeholders’, and residents’ perceptions. These findings highlight the need for involving local communities in the destination planning process to align the outcomes of tourism development with their expectations. Finally, this paper presents an original methodological contribution, as it is the first to apply the SciVal topic prominence analysis to SPTH.

Following the publication of the 2011 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Green Economy Report, the UNWTO published the Tourism in the Green Economy report as clear evidence of the tourism sector’s growing influence on green economy. This paper provides the first narrative review on green tourism economy based on all available published research. The paper synthesizes existing knowledge, reviews responses and initiatives on green tourism, and suggests future research and methodological approaches to help advance this field. The Scopus and WoS databases were used for the bibliometric study. The results are structured into three sections—challenges, opportunities, and enabling conditions—which comprehensively cover the main themes.

The COVID-19 crisis has encouraged a major shift towards greater environmental awareness and sustainable consumption. However, in times of severe crisis, SMEs primarily look to return to normalcy and their own survival rather than implementing a sustainable agenda. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the learning problems faced by small tourism enterprises in a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper explores the learning capacity of SMEs and the importance of establishing mechanisms that provide SMEs with the keys to organizational learning as a source of continuous knowledge. Open-ended semi-structured interviews with 39 tourism SMEs managers in Galicia (Spain) were conducted during the toughest months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show that SMEs have not been fully involved in the learning process, which is mainly related to knowledge transfer and integration. DMOs can act as promoters of knowledge management for organizational preparedness by providing SMEs with learning mechanisms and strategies to go beyond simple problem solving when they arise.

In sun-and-beach destinations, weather has a decisive influence on the variability of the daily flow of tourists. Uncertainty in demand flows directly affects businesses and employment. This work aims to improve understanding of the behaviour of tourists in response to changes in weather conditions. The analysis is carried out in the Rías Baixas, a sun-and-beach destination in north-west Spain. The paper analyses the relationship of weather conditions with daily flows during the high season at the main tourist beaches in the area, also considering two beach typologies. The density of beach use is measured three times a day through the analysis of webcam images in combination with real-time weather, and an online survey is conducted among tourists who have visited these beaches. The results show that the hours of sunshine are the most influential weather factor. Weather forecast greatly or totally influenced the decision to go to the beach for almost 70% of respondents and about 80% of the respondents checked on the weather before visiting a beach.

Sustainability in tourism cannot be achieved without decent work, gender equality and empowerment of all women. Most of the workforce in the tourism sector is women, and although this sector offers great opportunities for empowerment and gender equality, there are many inequalities that occur in it. To find solutions it is necessary to have a greater knowledge, and therefore it is necessary to analyze how the gender equality research is progressing. The objective of this paper is to analyse how the concept of gender equality in tourism is present in academic research. For this purpose, a systematic review of the existing scientific literature is carried out, based on a bibliometric review of the works on gender equality in the field of tourism published in the Scopus database. The analysis carried out shows that, although there has been a year-on-year increase in publications related to gender equality in the field of tourism, there are still few studies focused on this subjetc, and that only in the last time have they been linked to the family. The analysis also reveals that only a few journals and authors concentrate publications related to gender equality in tourism.