Tourism Actors’ Responsible Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Responsible tourism studies have neglected divergent tourism actors’ contribution to sustainable tourism development via their behavior, as well as the impact of recent crises on research. Thus, a bibliometric and thematic analysis was conducted, involving an examination of 154 recent studies that were clustered around four research streams: (1) tourists’ responsible behavior; (2) residents’ responsible tourism accounts; (3) tourism businesses’ responsible actions; and (4) destination management’s role in responsible tourism, showing that responsible tourism research is predominantly focused on tourists’ responsibility. Tourism businesses and residents are less frequently investigated. Similarly, the role of destination management is only recently emerging, while governments’ contribution to responsible tourism has been neglected in research. Environmental responsibility studies dominate on the tourist and resident level, while corporate social responsibility (CSR) studies prevail on the business level. This literature review identifies research priorities in order to derive an agenda for future research.