Four decades of sustainable tourism research: Trends and future research directions

Abstract

With the growth of sustainable tourism research and its practical relevance in today's world, it is important to integrate and synthesize the vast amount ofintellectual work on this topic. This research applies a novel and robust structural topic modeling technique to analyze textual data from a total of 3289 research articles on sustainable tourism published between 1978 and 2022. The topics identified have been classified into macro, meso, and micro levels. Further, we compared and contrasted research themes across three time periods to provide a coherent, cohesive, and holistic overview of the extant literature in each period and discuss their contributions to knowledge. This article presents the publication trends, research evolution in the last four decades, and identifies emerging topics and future research opportunities to advance knowledge.

Evolution of Trends Affecting the Tourism Industry: Business Challenges in the Future

“…Maintaining economic prosperity without negatively affecting the environment is a dilemma governments and industry face, which has grave conse-quences for individuals and communities. (Agarwal et al, 2024) It is a generator of economic growth, creates infrastructure and jobs, improves the standard of living and the quality of life of people. In 2019, the tourism sector generated 10.4% of world GDP (9.2 trillion USD), 10.6% of all jobs (334 million), of which 54% were women, was responsible for opening 1 of 4 of all new jobs in the world and employed a higher proportion of young people than in the total economy (World Travel & Tourism Council 2021) .…”