A review of research into social tourism: Launching the Annals of Tourism Research Curated Collection on Social Tourism.

This article reviews the literature on social tourism for the first time. Social tourism has been in existence since the development of modern tourism but remains a niche research area. Partially, this is because social tourism constitutes part of public welfare policy and directed towards supporting participation in tourism activities by people whose financial or other circumstances prevent them from doing so. This literature review takes a conceptual approach to examine the theoretical underpinnings of social tourism. It combines a bibliometric analysis with an analytic review approach that assesses the key themes and evolution of published research articles in the field and develops a tourism as welfare model that identifies directions for the future development of research in this field