Strategic Decision-making in Tourism, Events, and Hospitality SMEs: A Scoping Review

Abstract

This study explores how strategic decision-making (SDM) is addressed in tourism, events, and hospitality research and how contextual factors shape the understanding of strategy. While strategy remains a recurring topic in the field, only limited attention has been given to explaining how strategic decisions are actually formed, negotiated, and realised in practice. Drawing on the strategic management literature (Mintzberg, 1987; Eisenhardt, 1999; Elbanna et al, 2020), strategy is here conceptualised as a contextually embedded and iterative decision process rather than a fixed plan or analytical outcome. The aim is to identify how SDM appears in recent strategy-labelled studies and what kinds of contextual assumptions guide its interpretation. A scoping review framework (Arksey and O’Malley, 2005; Peters et al, 2020) was applied to map the fragmented research landscape and clarify how SDM has been implicitly examined across the tourism and hospitality domains. A total of 183 peer-reviewed articles published between 2020 and 2025 in 15 SJR-ranked journals were systematically reviewed. The analytical framework consisted of three tiers: SDM types (deliberate, emergent, reactive), approaches to uncertainty, and decision-making contexts. This design enabled a structured synthesis of conceptual emphases and revealed how different streams of literature define and position strategy and decision-making under uncertainty. The findings indicate that strategy is mainly understood as an organisational activity with a short-term, operational orientation. Uncertainty is often considered a controllable variable rather than an inherent and generative aspect of strategic behaviour. Small and medium-sized enterprises, despite their centrality to the sector, are commonly described as reactive instead of proactive decision-makers. Digital, hybrid, and data-driven contexts remain underexplored, indicating a conceptual gap in understanding how strategic choices are shaped in service-oriented environments. The study contributes to the strategic management discourse by systematising how SDM has been studied in recent tourism and hospitality research and by identifying directions for future studies focusing on context, uncertainty, and strategic decision-making processes in dynamic service settings.