Purpose The current research work investigates the concept of halal tourism through research articles published during the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of what halal tourism means, while traveling following the Islamic law. This study also contributes to the discussion on its definition and the shared understanding, as it is extremely important toward the sustainable development of this niche tourism section. Design/methodology/approach A systematic literature review of total 47 number of existing literature, extracted from two major databases, namely, Scopus and Web of Science, was conducted. For data collection, the time frame from January 2020 to January 2023 was chosen, which represents the pandemic times during which those articles were published. Findings Although being a growing segment, halal tourism is still at a nascent stage in business research. It is potentially an attractive and niche segment of tourism. Current research work highlights the major contents related to halal tourism, dominant theories used in literature, publishing authors, journals and research gaps for further research. In this line, future research directions are also proposed toward the end of this paper. Originality/value This study highlights the conceptual development and discusses the opportunities and implementation of halal tourism in post-pandemic world. Current research work presents interesting contextual data and presents insightful knowledge in a new context. This paper offers a systematic analysis and provides both an academic as well as the managerial implications.

The work systematically reviews the articles published on sustainable tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper focuses on the current state of knowledge on sustainable tourism, identifies the relevant opportunities for successful implementation and development of sustainability in the tourism industry and gives future directions. Scopus and Web of Science databases were searched, and 184 papers were identified from 2020-to 2021. Each article was evaluated for the study's objective, the data collection steps, the data synthesis process, and the quality measures. The systematic review findings show an increasing interest in research on sustainable tourism adoption post-COVID-19 pandemic in the tourism industry. This is the very first article, which synthesises the published literature on sustainable tourism during COVID-19 pandemic, through Systematic Literature Review method. Our findings indicate that the applications of sustainability in tourism have been focused on all the tourism industry stakeholders. The study will be helpful to predict the extent of current and potential future pandemic effects on the tourism industry. It will also be beneficial for practitioners and policymakers to design new policies aimed at operational sustainability and capacity building of the tourism industry as an active recovery policy for counter-attacking the impact of COVID-19 on tourism.