A Review of Research on Inclusive Tourism: Clusters of Thematic Links and Research Gaps

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors This article is very interesting because it reveals the lack of work on the theme of inclusive
tourism even though many political leaders want to address this issue and operators are starting
to target certain segments excluded by mass tourism. Even if the authors mention the limits of their
choice of keywords, it is possible that the basic definition of the UNDP tends to actually restrict
the populations that can be concerned by inclusive tourism. For example, in my country, we talk about
inclusive tourism for stays offered to prisoners or violent children, particularly for domestic or
proximity tourism. Thus, we are no longer in sustainable development or accessible tourism, but more
in social tourism, or even in religious tourism when we are interested in buddhist or shamanist
minorities, etc. Therefore, a more "inclusive" definition of inclusive tourism seems interesting to me as an
introduction in order to further justify the positioning of the article and its future extension
in further research.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your insightful comments and for highlighting the broader dimensions of inclusive tourism. We have expanded our theoretical section to incorporate a more comprehensive definition—one that goes beyond traditional concerns of accessibility and sustainability, and acknowledges that inclusive tourism also encompasses various socially excluded or marginalized groups. This addition strengthens the conceptual foundation of our article and opens avenues for future research into the wider social applications of inclusive tourism.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to review the manuscript entitled, “A review of research on inclusive tourism. Clusters of thematic links and research gaps.”

I have some comments in each section.

Keywords

‘authors’ keywords’ is unnecessary and inappropriate in the keywords section. Providing key terms in this study is important.

 

Introduction

On page 2-3, it seems the authors attempt to discuss SDGs and inclusive tourism; however, the flow of the discussion is not very coherent. While the authors correctly mention that tourism is directly referenced in only three of the SDGs (Goals 8, 12, and 14), they later include Goals 4, 8, 10, and 11 without clearly explaining the rationale for their inclusion. This creates some confusion, since these goals are not originally framed by the authors themselves. The SDG goals occupies a large portion of these introduction without clear explanation, but presenting the goals. It does not clearly connect to the inclusions in hospitality and tourism or arguments of this study.

 

2. review of key bibliometric studies

In the section, the first paragraph lacks any citations. In a literature review, it is essential to include references to support the authors’ claims and to demonstrate engagement with existing scholarship. Moreover, this section provides only a brief and somewhat simple summary of bibliometric studies without offering critical analysis or synthesized information. This section should be revised to provide more analytical insights.

 

2. review of key bibliometric studies

The contents on pages 4-5 on 162-166.

The content is somewhat strange. If there are many studies using the bibliometric studies on inclusive tourism, why do this study explore the same thing again? Some examples of the bibliometric studies in this section do not appear to focus on particularly on inclusive tourism. This sentence overstate their relevance to this topic.

 

3. Research objective and methodology

It is recommended that the research objectives be clearly stated within the introduction, alongside the research background and rationale.

The research questions use the term accessible tourism, while the rest of the manuscript often refers to inclusive tourism. For clarity and consistency, it would be better to use a consistent term throughout the manuscript.

 

method

Moreover, the research procedures need to be described more thoroughly, and sufficient citations should be included to support this study’s methodology approach.

Given the importance of the methodology in this study, more detailed information should be provided. In particular, the process of data selection should be clearly explained, and the inclusion of a figure that illustrate this process would increase readers’ understanding.

 

Keywords

The process through which the final set of 85 keywords was selected is not clearly explained. Please clarify how the final 85 keywords were selected and were classified into 8 categories.

 

Keywords in each cluster

The detailed keywords within each cluster are presented above the main text sections, which feels somewhat unconventional. It may be clearer and more appropriate to present them in a table or figure.

 

 

The data

The study analyzed 200 research articles, but it is unclear which articles were included. It would be helpful to provide information of the analyzed publications.

It would be important to include a descriptive analysis of the selected articles, such as journal names, authors, affiliations, and countries. Providing these details would offer valuable context and help readers better understand the characteristics and scope of the analyzed literature.

 

Discussion

It would be more effective if the research questions were clearly addressed in the results section, while the discussion section focused on providing a deeper interpretation and critical reflection on the findings. The discussion seems to reiterate answers to the research questions rather than offering more in-depth discussion.

Author Response

Thank you for your thorough and constructive feedback on our manuscript. We have carefully considered each of your comments and revised the paper accordingly. Below, we outline the main changes and our justifications:

• Removed the label “authors’ keywords” and replaced it with a concise list of key terms directly relevant to our study.
• Refined the SDG section to clearly justify the selection of Goals 4, 8, 10, 11, 12, and 14 and explicitly link each to inclusive tourism.
• Clarified the research gap—namely, the absence of bibliometric analyses combining inclusive tourism with sustainable development—and explained our choice of the most recent and thematically relevant studies on each topic separately.
• Standardized terminology throughout the manuscript by using “inclusive tourism and related terms” instead of alternating between “accessible tourism” and “inclusive tourism.”
• Added a flowchart depicting every methodological step—from framing research questions, through the Scopus search and data download, to VOSviewer clustering and manual thematic analysis.
• Specified that only author keywords occurring in at least three articles were included, resulting in 85 keywords grouped into eight clusters by VOSviewer.
• Moved the full list of keywords for each cluster into a dedicated Table 2, instead of embedding them directly in the text.
• Explained in the text which 200 articles were included and provided a complete list of all records in an appendix.
• Enhanced the discussion with more literature-based interpretation and critical reflection on our findings.
• We chose not to relocate the direct answers to the research questions into the Results section because:
1. Presenting them in the Discussion allows us to integrate our findings with theoretical implications and existing literature in a more nuanced way.
2. This structure supports a reflective, critical interpretation rather than a purely descriptive reporting of results.

We believe these changes improve the manuscript’s clarity, coherence, and scholarly contribution.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The study is relevant, as inclusive tourism is becoming an important component of the socio-economic development of a country or region. The article has scientific and practical value.

However, the article needs to be improved.

1. The research is based only on publications from the Scopus database, so the authors need to justify their choice. It should be indicated why research from other databases was not included.
2. The research methodology is described in general. It should be explained in more detail - by what criteria the articles were selected, what parameters VOSviewer analyzed, in what language the articles were studied, for what period, etc. The methodology can be presented in the form of a flowchart.
3. It is worth adding practical significance to the conclusions, in particular for practitioners in the field of tourism - tour operators, city planners, government officials, etc.
4. When characterizing thematic clusters, it is advisable to indicate the authors who worked on this topic, supplementing with references to sources, words such as “Researchers emphasise that…”, “Several authors also point out that…”, etc.
5. Fig. 2 shows the period 2018-2023, and in the analysis the authors also provide the period 2023-2025. Why is the period 2023-2025 not included in the graph?
6. It is not clear that the authors analyze accessible, inclusive and sustainable tourism, and in the research questions they only note accessible and sustainable tourism, omitting inclusive tourism. The annotation does the opposite - inclusive tourism and its links with related research directions are mentioned, but it is not mentioned what these directions are. This inconsistency between the goal, objectives and research questions should be corrected.
7. Since the terms "tourism without barriers", "integrative tourism" and "universal tourism" did not appear in the network at all, it is unclear why the authors included them in the search in the Scopus database, and why the authors decided to include these terms.

I wish the author success in improving the research.

Author Response

Thank you for your constructive review. Below is a summary of the revisions we implemented in response to your comments:

1. We expanded our rationale to explain why Scopus was chosen as the sole data source—highlighting its comprehensive coverage, consistency of metadata, and the need to avoid duplication and incompatibilities.
2. We provided detailed selection criteria (time period, languages, keyword thresholds), specified the VOSviewer parameters used for co-word and cluster analysis, and incorporated a flowchart illustrating each procedural step.
3. We enriched the conclusions with targeted recommendations for practitioners outlining how our findings can inform inclusive-tourism strategies and sustainable development initiatives.
4. For each of the eight clusters, we added illustrative citations from the analyzed articles (e.g., “Research by X et al. highlights…”) and included a complete list of sources in the appendix to demonstrate authorship and context.
5. We corrected the description, which was indeed inaccurate—the analysis covers the period up to 2025. As for the color scale in Figure 2, while the last labeled year is 2023, the scale itself does not end there.
6. To resolve inconsistencies between “accessible tourism,” “inclusive tourism,” and related concepts, we uniformly use the phrase “inclusive tourism and related terms” in our goals, research questions, and manuscript text.
7. We clarified that “tourism without barriers,” “integrative tourism,” and “universal tourism” were included based on prior literature identifying these as synonymous or closely related concepts—despite their absence in our final network—thereby ensuring comprehensive coverage of the field. Additionally, we added a paragraph in the discussion section interpreting this fact.

We trust that these revisions strengthen the manuscript’s rigor, coherence, and practical relevance.

 

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors/

First, I would like to thank you for your effort in preparing this article. However, I still have many critical comments that I believe could help improve the quality of the study:

1- In bibliometric analysis studies, it is generally recommended to follow the PRISMA framework. This helps readers clearly understand how records were selected, including the inclusion and exclusion criteria.

2- The authors did not mention any exclusion criteria. For example, were non-English articles included or excluded? This raises many unanswered questions that should be clarified.

3- The timeframe of the data collection is missing. Since bibliometric analysis focuses on scientific production (which is constantly evolving) the authors need to clearly state the time period covered in their dataset.

4- According to the manuscript, the authors used the following search query in Scopus:
["sustainable development" OR "sustainable tourism" OR "sustainability" AND "inclusive tourism" OR "accessible tourism" OR "social tourism" OR "tourism for all" OR "tourism without barriers" OR "integrative tourism" OR "universal tourism"], targeting abstracts, titles, and keywords, resulting in a dataset of 200 articles.

However, I attempted to replicate this query using the same search fields in Scopus and got only 175 documents, even though my check was done after the authors completed their work. I expected to get more articles, not fewer, SURPRISING. This discrepancy raises concerns about the accuracy of the dataset, and I encourage the authors to address this clearly, as it directly affects the credibility and reliability of their findings.

5- The authors should go beyond simply reporting the output of software tools like VOSviewer. For example, statements such as "In VOSviewer, the software grouped…" are descriptive but lack depth. What matters more is the authors own interpretation of the results?

6- Since the study aims to address a research gap in the field of inclusive tourism through bibliometric analysis, I expected more than just keyword analysis. Other techniques such as thematic analysis, country and institutional collaboration, author co-authorship networks, keyword burst analysis, and more could significantly enrich the study. In my opinion, keyword clustering alone is not sufficient to capture the complexity of such a multifaceted topic, inclusive tourism.

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable comments and suggestions. We appreciate the time and effort you have taken to provide constructive feedback, which helped us improve the quality of our manuscript. Please find our detailed responses below:

We have revised the methodology section and provided a more detailed description of the research process. Specifically, we clarified that no exclusion criteria were applied regarding language or document type. We also added the visual representation (flowchart) to enhance transparency.

We have re-run the search on May 13, 2025, using the same fields (title, abstract, keywords) and retrieved 220 documents.

In the original version of the manuscript, we complemented the software-based clustering (via VOSviewer) with a manual, thematic categorization of the articles based on their titles and abstracts. This step allowed us to interpret and group the publications into meaningful thematic areas beyond the automated output. We have now made this dual approach more visible and explicit in the revised methodology and discussion sections. Although the study focuses on keyword co-occurrence, this interpretative layer has been an integral part of our analysis from the outset.

We recognize that additional bibliometric techniques—such as co-authorship or institutional collaboration analysis—could further enrich the study, and we consider this a valuable direction for future research. However, our current aim was to explore thematic developments within the field of inclusive tourism, using a focused yet interpretatively rich approach.

Once again, thank you for your insightful comments. We believe the improvements have strengthened the manuscript considerably.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for your revision.

The topic is very interesting, but in terms of overall completeness, it is difficult to recommend the paper for publication at this stage. There are too many bullet points, and the writing is not well-developed overall.

I have some comments.

 

Reviewer comments

Please respond to each comment individually and describe in detail how you revise the corresponding parts.

 

Data and citation

The data information is not specific enough and the citations are also insufficient.

 

Data information

It would be helpful to explain the information presented in Table 2 and provide a justification for the data selection. In bibliometric analysis, prior literature serves as the dataset, so without this information, readers cannot understand what data was analyzed.

The data collection procedure must be described in a very detailed and transparent manner.

 

keywords

It is not clear how the 85 keywords were classified into 8 clusters, or how the keywords within each cluster were derived. Simply stating that the program generated them is not sufficient for readers to understand the process. A detailed explanation of the clustering procedure, including the criteria or parameters used, is necessary.

 

Results – cluster interpretation

The explanation of the analyzed clusters appears to rely heavily on the author’s own ideas, without sufficient citation support. Phrases like some, most, many, or general descriptions make it difficult for readers to evaluate the reliability and validity of the findings. It is recommended to support the interpretation with relevant literature or clearer justification.

 

 

 

Author Response

We would like to thank the Reviewer for their valuable comments and the opportunity to improve our manuscript. Please find below our responses and the changes implemented accordingly:

 

 

Data and citation

The data information is not specific enough and the citations are also insufficient.

We acknowledge the Reviewer’s observation regarding the need for more specific data information and additional citations. As our study is a scoping review, not a systematic review, our primary aim was to map and explore the existing body of literature on accessible and inclusive tourism using bibliometric methods. This has now been clearly stated in the revised methodology section. We have also added references that define and support the scoping review approach. 

 

Data information

It would be helpful to explain the information presented in Table 2 and provide a justification for the data selection. In bibliometric analysis, prior literature serves as the dataset, so without this information, readers cannot understand what data was analyzed.

The data collection procedure must be described in a very detailed and transparent manner.

 In the previous revised version, we have provided a clearer justification for the data selection. We have elaborated on the data collection process in greater detail, including the exact search terms, databases used (Scopus), timeframe, and inclusion/exclusion criteria.

keywords

It is not clear how the 85 keywords were classified into 8 clusters, or how the keywords within each cluster were derived. Simply stating that the program generated them is not sufficient for readers to understand the process. A detailed explanation of the clustering procedure, including the criteria or parameters used, is necessary.

We appreciate the Reviewer’s point regarding the classification of the 85 keywords into 8 clusters. We have now included a paragraph explaining how VOSviewer generates clusters, including the co-occurrence analysis, minimum number of keyword appearances, and the algorithmic method (e.g. LinLog/modularity-based clustering) used to group the keywords. This section has been enhanced with references to methodological literature to improve transparency and reader understanding.

 

Results – cluster interpretation

The explanation of the analyzed clusters appears to rely heavily on the author’s own ideas, without sufficient citation support. Phrases like some, most, many, or general descriptions make it difficult for readers to evaluate the reliability and validity of the findings. It is recommended to support the interpretation with relevant literature or clearer justification.

 

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

Thank you for your response to my comments. While I appreciate your effort, I still feel the manuscript lacks the core fundamentals needed to make a meaningful contribution to the field of inclusive tourism. Here's why:

1- I see almost no changes between the new version and the old one, which is disappointing.

2- The authors still don't seem to fully grasp how bibliometric studies should be conducted. I suggested using the PRISMA framework to make the selection process transparent, but this wasn't addressed.

3- Identifying research gaps and trends in inclusive tourism can't be done just by manually classifying keywords. I recommended deeper use of bibliometric analysis tools to strengthen the study, but the authors only mentioned this as a future direction.

Overall, in my opinion, this remains a very basic bibliometric analysis that misses many key elements. I had hoped to help elevate the work, but unfortunately, that hasn't happened.

Thank you and I wish you a good luck.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your second round of comments and your engagement with our manuscript.

We would like to clarify that this study is a scoping review, not a systematic review, which is why the PRISMA protocol, although valuable, is not fully applicable here. However, we have revised and expanded the methodology section to clearly state that this is a scoping review and to describe the data collection process more transparently.

We have also added explanations about how VOSviewer clusters are generated, including a brief description of the clustering algorithm and selection criteria.

In response to your concern about keyword interpretation, we understand the limitations and made efforts to address them by including specific figures (e.g., % of articles) wherever possible, instead of general terms like "most" or "many." This was done to improve the transparency and reliability of the results.

While we acknowledge that our study is not a comprehensive bibliometric mapping using advanced techniques, it aims to provide an exploratory overview of current research trends in inclusive tourism. We hope the recent revisions make this goal clearer.

Thank you again for your feedback and time.

 

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for your revision.

The manuscript is added information based on the comments.

The supplementary material (i.e., the list of the articles) is helpful.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your positive feedback.
We are glad that the additional information and supplementary material were helpful. We appreciate your time and valuable comments that contributed to improving the manuscript.

 

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Author,

Thank you for your response. While you've tried to explain the reasoning behind your study, I still feel it doesn't fully match what you've described.

- You mention that your study is a "scoping review", not a "bibliometric analysis study" or "systematic review study." Let's go with this concept. If this is truly a scoping review, it should explore a wide range of evidence (not just peer-reviewed publications, but also reports, policies, etc., especially since your topic is inclusive tourism). However, you only extracted data from Scopus, which limits the scope.

- Regardless of whether this is a scoping review, bibliometric analysis, or systematic review, you collected a dataset from a bibliographic database (Scopus). In such cases, using a PRISMA flowchart isn't optional; it's mandatory to clearly explain:

• starting by your search query,
• How you selected studies,
• Your inclusion/exclusion criteria,
• And how you reached your final dataset.

Without this, the transparency and rigor of your review are weakened.

- Since this is a "scoping review" but used bibliometric analysis to review the literature and identify research gaps, you should know that a scoping review is broader in concept than a bibliometric study. It should cover theories, methods, and gaps, not just publication trends from Scopus.

Author Response

Dear Sir or Madam,

thank you very much for your thoughtful comments and for taking the time to engage critically with our manuscript. We sincerely appreciate the opportunity to further clarify our methodological approach and the rationale behind key choices made in the course of the study.

In response to your concern regarding the use of a single bibliographic database (Scopus) in a study described as a scoping review, we would like to provide the following clarification

In our review, the decision was made to use only the Scopus database, due to the specific nature of the research objective and the characteristics of the topic under analysis. The main aim of the research component was to identify the scale and nature of the relationship between two research areas – sustainable tourism and inclusive tourism – in the academic literature. Although these two approaches are theoretically related and often grounded in similar value frameworks, they rarely appear together in a single analysis or publication. The goal, therefore, was to highlight, among other things, the discrepancy between the number of works devoted to each of these topics separately and the number of publications that integrate both approaches.

Scopus was selected as a comprehensive and interdisciplinary source of scholarly literature, indexing publications across tourism, geography, social sciences, disability studies, and public policy. In addition to its broad thematic coverage, Scopus provides advanced tools for analyzing publication trends and keyword co-occurrence, which were particularly important for examining publication volume, chronology, and the use of terminology. Preliminary analysis showed that the vast majority of publications relevant to the topic of interest were indexed in this database, confirming its representativeness for the purposes of a scoping review.

It is important to emphasize that the analysis did not constitute a systematic literature review, but rather aimed to explore the scope, evolution, and conceptual linkages within the existing academic discourse. Therefore, the decision to limit the review to a single database—although a certain simplification—was considered sufficient in light of the research objectives. This limitation was consciously adopted and is acknowledged in the section discussing the study’s limitations. 

We would like to clarify that the information regarding the search query, study selection process, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the final dataset is comprehensively described in the Methodology section of the manuscript. To support transparency, we have also included a graphic that visually illustrates the stages of the review process, from the initial identification of sources to the final selection of documents analyzed.

We believe this provides sufficient clarity and rigor for the type of scoping review we conducted. However, we remain open to adding further detail should you consider any aspect insufficiently explained.

Once again, we truly appreciate your constructive feedback, which has helped us refine and strengthen the clarity and rigor of our manuscript.

Kind regards,

Authors