Tourism and climate change research is an evolving knowledge domain. Based on the theory of mapping knowledge domain, this paper analyses the development of this research frontier and knowledge base, the current foci of research, and the social network structure of tourism and climate change research in a visual way, by taking the Web of Science as the data source. The results showed the following. (1) The evolution of tourism and climate change research has been along the continuum of "influence" to "adaption" to "mitigation", in other words from a single issue orientation towards multi-dimensional comprehensive understanding, even though specific concerns such as carbon emissions from tourist activity have been core research issues for some time. (2) Twelve seminal papers on tourism and climate change can be identified as being the most important for the development of the knowledge base and network evolution in the tourism and climate change domain: "The global environmental consequences of tourism"; "Climate change and the skiing industry in Southern Ontario (Canada): exploring the importance of snowmaking as a technical adaptation"; "Tourist Perceptions of International Air Travel Impact on the Global Climate and Potential Climate Change Policies"; "Impact of Climate on Tourist Demand"; "Aviation radiative forcing in 2000: an update on the IPCC (1999)"; "Implications of global climate change for tourism flows and seasonality"; "Impacts of climate change on winter tourism in the Swiss Alps"; "Forecasting tourism demand: a review of empirical research"; "Tourism climatology: evaluating environmental information for decision making and business planning in the recreation and tourism sector"; "Recreation climate assessment"; "Giving Wings to Emission Trading: Inclusion of Aviation Under the European Emission Trading System (ETS): Design and Impacts"; and "A convenient truth: air travel passengers' willingness to pay to offset their CO₂ emissions". (3) Tourism and climate change research involves multiple disciplines, with researchers mainly found in Europe, North America, Oceania and East Asia, the most developed regions of the world at present. Our research shows that cooperative inter-regional networks have been formed amongst researchers from the United Kingdom (UK), the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Norway, Italy, Ireland, Denmark, Canada, and New Zealand, with the UK, the Netherlands and Sweden as the center of these networks. (4) The research groups identified in this study form an initiative core-borderline social network structure, with three research teams, which are led by Richard S. J. Tol, Stefan Gössling and Daniel Scott, located at its core. However, as full cooperation between research institutions remains slim, a scaled network has not yet been formed. We have also identified several high-impact research institutes in the tourism and climate change research domain, such as those at the University of Waterloo in Canada, Griffith University in Australia, Lund University in Sweden, the Economic and Social Research Institute in Ireland, and at Hamburg University in Germany. In summary, our research shows that the top 10 countries for tourism and climate change research are the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, the United States, New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Sweden, and China.