Purpose This paper aims to analyse the most significant disruptive events affecting tourism during the twenty-first century, particularly the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach Based on a thorough literature review, this study takes a complexity science approach to the field of tourism to shed light on the challenges of disruptive events in tourism systems. Findings Focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, this study acknowledges that disruptive events are complex and have tremendous impacts on several areas of society: people’s psychological well-being and the health-care system, as well as social, economic, cultural, technological, environmental and political dimensions. Whether they occur alone or interact, these dimensions add varying levels of complexity to the tourism system. In response, the tourism industry can adopt a resilience model as a crisis management tool to address disruptive events affecting this field. Research limitations/implications As this paper is mainly theoretical, future empirical research will contribute to refining the findings and testing the usefulness of the proposed model. Practical implications The paper looks at examples of successful and unsuccessful of COVID-19 outbreak management in various countries to analyse issues such as crisis management, resilience and tools for coping with the impacts of disruptive events. Originality/value This theoretical paper proposes a first taxonomy of the multidimensional impacts of twenty-first-century disruptive events on tourism and dissects the phases of crisis management, with a corresponding conceptual model.

PurposeThis research aims at arriving at a broad scope of the lessons learnt after two years of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak by analysing the catalyst and inhibiting factors within three aspects of the tourism sector: destination crisis management, tourist behaviour and tourism industry trends.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology of this paper involves semi-structured interviews with high-ranking European travel agents as the agents represent the intermediates between the tourism offer and demand.FindingsData obtained from travel agents disclosed the factors that catalysed and inhibited the destination, the behaviour of tourists and the tourism industry trends. By contrasting data with previous literature, constructing an overview of the positive and negative outcomes of the pandemic in the tourism sector is possible.Practical implicationsGovernments, destination marketing and management organisations and tourism and hospitality organisations could learn from the lessons of COVID-19 outbreak to cope better with future disruptive events affecting the tourism industry.Originality/valueThe paper is novel as it is the first overview that attempts to synthesise the lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic in the tourism sector by analysing tourism sector's three dimensions: the destination, the tourists and the industry.