Abstract
This paper systematically reviews existing literature on co-opetition within tourism destinations and focuses exclusively on tourism and hospitality research to control for industry-specific factors. Interdependence and complementarity characterize the tourism industry and its product. Hence, the identification of the extent to which existing research has addressed not only context- but also industry-specific co-opetition factors might be the key to understanding the behaviour of the stakeholders involved in a tourism destination, distinguishing it from other industries’ settings. To this end, 20 tourism and hospitality top-journal publications have been selected, coded, and analysed. Results suggest that most of the studies investigate context-specific rather than industry-specific factors. Hence, they call for increased attention to this emerging research field and for new paths for adapting co-opetition to tourism research to consider not only destinations’ specific contexts but also the peculiarity of the tourism product, characterized by the complementarity of its components and triggering interesting dynamics between the involved stakeholders. This paper can prove useful to identify prevalent research orientations and contributions for scholars and students interested in the tourism and hospitality industry.