Circular economy and sustainability for a higher quality tourism experience: a systematic literature review

Purpose – the present study aims to understand how and to what extend the concepts of circular economy (CE) and sustainability are discussed in the tourism field and to depict their role in the definition of a higher quality tourism experience.
Design/methodology/approach – To achieve the paper’s aim, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is conducted according to the PRISMA protocol (Pickering & Byrne, 2014; Pickering et al., 2015) and 64 records were considered for the study. A content analysis is adopted to examine and categorize the documents (Pasca et al., 2021; Rahman, 2021).
Findings – The study provides a comprehensive understanding of the concepts of sustainability and circularity in the tourism field by identifying three categories of analysis distinguished by the scope of the studies and the main aspects explored related to the issue of interest. Moreover, current gaps and future research agenda were depicted as well as the different implications in defining the quality of the tourism experience.

tourism, sustainability, circular economy, tourism experience quality.