This paper makes a new contribution to the understanding of challenges for the transition toward the circular economy (CE) by identifying the main CE challenge patterns (CECPs) and analyzing their relevance for the tourism sector. Our work is based on a previous systematic literature review of 42 articles on CE through open coding following grounded theory. This allowed us to identify 68 CECPs and classify them into three levels of abstraction: microenvironmental, macroenvironmental, and organizational. To make this general research relevant to the tourism industry we conducted semi-structured interviews with 33 experts in CE and tourism, ensuring that theoretical saturation was reached. The data was analyzed in two coding phases, identifying which general CECPs are applicable to the tourism industry and which of them need further specification. The result shows that 34 of the 68 CECPs are applicable to tourism, of which 41% need to be specified to be relevant to the sector. Especially at the microenvironmental level, 53% of the general CECPs needed to be specified for the case of tourism. The analysis allowed to identify the 10 most crucial CECPs for the tourism industry and which of them have been most affected by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.