The circular economy in tourism: transition perspectives for business and research

ABSTRACT

Despite being classified as a service sector, producing immaterial services, tourism relies on huge quantities and flows of exhaustible natural resources and largely reflects a linear take-make-dispose production model. In recent years, the concept of the circular economy (CE) and its restorative and regenerative principles for production and consumption, has attracted growing attention among businesses, policy makers and researchers. While the concept of sustainability increasingly is applied in tourism research, the implications of CE in tourism have not received much attention. This paper argues that CE offers great potentials as an integrative and instructive framework for encouraging more sustainable tourism practices. It introduces, theoretically, CE in a broader socio-technical transition perspective, explores tourism as the specific context for application and provides an empirical example of a Danish hotel, inspired by a pragmatic circular business model. The paper also argues that tourism, due to its close host–guest relationships, potentially holds transformative potentials beyond how CE has been used in other fields. The paper thereby contributes to research debates about the transformative power of tourism.

KEYWORDS:

• Circular economy in tourism
• transformational tourism
• circular economy narratives
• tourism innovation
• sustainable experiences

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Some CSR programmes already earlier had a focus on reuse and design within the hospitality sector (Bohdanowicz & Zientara, 2008; Sandve & Øgaard, 2013).

2 GSH is labelled here as an empirical example and not a case, as the study did not monitor or measure actual circular resource flows, nor included direct empirical input from employees and guests.

3 This is the term used by GSH to brand their hotel technologies.

4 See https://www.activehouse.info/.

5 The DGNB certificate is based on a global benchmark for sustainability in buildings. See more at: https://www.dgnb-system.de/en/.