Critical review of strategic planning research in hospitality and tourism

• Reflect on the inconsistency of strategic planning theory and practice.
• Provide a literature review of hospitality and tourism strategic planning research.
• Identify 77 strategic planning and 48 strategic management articles.
• Limited awareness of effective strategic planning processes.
• Observe methodological introspection and highlight future research agenda.

Strategic planning remains one of the most popular management tools, but theoretical and empirical developments in the academic literature have been a slow burn. This paper addresses this gap and provides an up-to-date review of hospitality and tourism strategic planning research. We review strategic planning research from 1995 to 2013 in seven leading tourism academic journals, and adopt a modern and broad conceptualization of strategic planning. While there is some awareness of effective tourism strategic planning processes, academic research has not kept pace with practice. To stimulate a resurgence of research interest, we provide future research directions. We observe a methodological introspection and present some new research methodologies, which are critically important in researching the turbulent, chaotic and nonlinear tourism environment.