Description
Purpose of the research:
The COVID-19 pandemic halted the tourism and hospitality industry, and every stakeholder suffered a lot because of the nature of this service industry. As the pandemic virus was spreading from one source to another, the World Health Organisation (WHO) decided to shut down this service industry for the time being. According to the report published WTTC, (2024), the travel and tourism industry created 22 million new jobs in 2022, up 22% from 2021, contributing 7.6% of the global GDP. However, tourist movements contributed in generating more carbon dioxide (CO2), which is responsible for global warming and becomes a hindrance in supporting Sustainable Development Goals (SDG13 – Climate action) (Eroğlu, 2021). Various environment conservation organisations have raised their concerns for a new resilient tourism industry Hussain & Haley (2022), an eco-friendly tourism sector, to mitigate the danger of the global pandemic (Hussain, 2021; Hussain & Fusté-Forné, 2021). Here, the words "regenerative tourism and hospitality" emerged. According to Andersson (2019), it is a sustainable practice followed by travellers while exploring new locations. It can help minimise the negative impact of tourism, regenerate the ecosystem, support the economy, and sustain cultures.
This study attempts to identify the available literature on "regenerative tourism and hospitality" and their global reach, development of various clusters/themes and their role in supporting regenerative tourism and hospitality and highly cited publication in this field and their insights. It also provides an overview of publications from various countries and continents, which can help understand the countries' and continents' contributions to this noble and global concern.
Methods:
There are various ways to perform literature, such as literature review, systematic literature review, narrative review, meta-analysis, bibliometric review, etc. There are various bibliometric and performance analysis tools, such as Publish or Perish, ScientoPyUI, and CRExplorer. Bibexcel, BiblioShiny, BiblioMaps, CiteSpace, CitNetExplorer, SciMAT, Sci2 Tool, and VOSviewer are tools for Science mapping analysis (Moral-Muñoz et al., 2020). The present study uses the bibliometric analysis method using the R-package "bibliometrix" version 4.2.3 created by (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017).
Authors have explored two of the most reputed databases such as Elsivier's Scopus and Clarivate's Web of Science (WoS), with ("Regenerative" and ("Tourism" or "Hospitality")) Keywords in articles, abstracts and keywords sections to extract the metadata. PRISMA explains the data cleaning and merging steps, whereas Biblioshiny (R-package) is used to merge and remove duplicate data. After manual screening, 65 articles were used for the final analysis.
Key findings:
Performance analysis is performed to check the publication growth trends. The first article on this area was published in 2003, titled "Need and options for regenerative energy supply in holiday facilities" by (Bode et al., 2003), which suggested using emission-free energy for the sustainability of the tourism industry. This topic has seen manifold publication growth in recent years, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Australian and European continents have contributed the most in this direction. Australia, as a country, is the biggest contributor to publishing their work on this global concern. Bibliographic coupling of clusters generated the four themes: sustainable harmony, resilient future, circular sustainability, and nature revisit, which have developed from the keywords plus appearances discussing adopting renewable energy sources and protecting biodiversity. "Transforming the tourism world for good and regenerating the potential new normal," authored by Ateljevic (2020), appeared as the most cited article highlighting the connection between regenerative agriculture and transformative tourism, aiming to reset the global tourism system. The second most cited article, "Changing Paradigms and Global Change from Sustainable to steady-state Tourism", authored by Hall (2010), discussed that steady-state tourism encourages qualitative development without sacrificing natural capital for quantitative growth. Cave & Dredge (2020) authored the article "Regenerative Tourism Needs Diverse Economic Practices", which received the third highest citations and highlighted the transformation of the tourism operating system for building more resilient and sustainable tourism and visitor economies. Dredge (2022) highlighted three key findings for regenerative tourism: a shift in social-ecological consciousness, embracing complexity as a system, and adopting a bottom-up approach focused on place, community, and environment.
References:
Andersson, J. (2019, October 14). What is the opportunity of regenerative tourism? Regenerate the Future. https://medium.com/activate-the-future/understanding-the-opportunity-of-regenerative-tourism-894136cafd3b
Aria, M., & Cuccurullo, C. (2017). bibliometrix: An R-tool for comprehensive science mapping analysis. Journal of Informetrics, 11(4), 959–975. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2017.08.007
Ateljevic, I. (2020). Transforming the (tourism) world for good and (re)generating the potential 'new normal.' Tourism Geographies, 22(3), 467–475. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2020.1759134
Bode, S., Hapke, J., & Zisler, S. (2003). Need and options for a regenerative energy supply in holiday facilities. Tourism Management, 24(3), 257–266. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0261-5177(02)00067-5
Cave, J., & Dredge, D. (2020). Regenerative tourism needs diverse economic practices. Tourism Geographies, 22(3), 503–513. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2020.1768434
Eroğlu, H. (2021). Effects of Covid-19 outbreak on environment and renewable energy sector. Environment, Development and Sustainability, 23(4), 4782–4790. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-020-00837-4
Hall, C. M. (2010). Changing Paradigms and Global Change: From Sustainable to Steady-state Tourism. Tourism Recreation Research, 35(2), 131–143. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508281.2010.11081629
Hussain, A. (2021). A Future of Tourism Industry: Conscious Travel, Destination Recovery And Regenerative Tourism. 1.
Hussain, A., & Fusté-Forné, F. (2021). Conscious travel paradigm and the future of tourism: The need for regenerative tourism.
Hussain, A., & Haley, M. (2022). Regenerative Tourism Model: Challenges of Adapting Concepts from Natural Science to Tourism Industry. 2.
Moral-Muñoz, J. A., Herrera-Viedma, E., Santisteban-Espejo, A., & Cobo, M. J. (2020). Software tools for conducting bibliometric analysis in science: An up-to-date review. El Profesional de La Información, 29(1). https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2020.ene.03
WTTC. (2024). Economic Impact Research Report [Annual]. https://wttc.org/research/economic-impact.
