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.