Tourism marketing research: Past, present and future

•Tourism marketing research is analysed using the Tourism Marketing Knowledge Grid.•Past work focuses on making and keeping promises to consumers and has mostly.•Generated second order knowledge which does not imply causal relationships.•Future research generating strategic and research principles is much needed, as is.•Increased understanding of how promises made to tourists can be enabled.

This paper creates a Tourism Marketing Knowledge Grid and uses it as a framework for the review. The grid reveals that extant tourism marketing research has primarily focused on how service promises are made and kept, and has mostly generated frameworks to improve managerial decision making or provided insights about associations between constructs. Strategic principles, underpinned by the understanding of cause-effect relationships, are rare. These findings point to exciting opportunities for future research, including increased attention on enabling promises made to tourists and development of strategic and research principles; increased use of experimental, quasi-experimental and longitudinal research designs, as well as unstructured qualitative designs; and an increased focus on the study of actual behavior.

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