Purpose The purpose of this study is to fill a gap in literature with a meta-analysis of previous studies assessing the decision-making processes of travellers when choosing holiday destinations in times of crisis. Design/methodology/approach This study presents here an abductive analysis of the findings of 737 peer-reviewed studies published in leading hospitality and tourism journals between 1978 and 2020. The studies in question concentrate on tourist typologies and behaviours when making destination choices in times of crisis, and the garnered data was subjected to a computer-aided data analysis adopting a thematic analysis technique, making use of Leximancer software. Findings The data was subjected to a thematic analysis and clustered under five main categories based on the distribution of articles by publication year, research topic, author contributions, articles by journal and articles by country (e.g. tourist typology, travellers' decision-making, holiday decision-making, tourist decision-making, destination choice, traveller behaviour and vacation decision-making). Research limitations/implications The limitations of this study include its inclusion only of articles listed in the SCOPUS, Web of Science and ScienceDirect databases. This study makes a critical assessment of the current gaps in literature and proposes questions to be raised in future studies. Originality/value This study proposes several topics for future investigation that are considered necessary to close crucial gaps in our understanding of the tourism sector's response to behavioural trends. The authors' intention in this regard is to increase the scholarly awareness of decision-making models relevant to destination choice by linking tourist typologies and the behaviour exhibited before, during and after crises.