Indexing: Web of Science (ESCI), Scopus (CiteScore: 1.2)
Indexing: Web of Science (ESCI), Scopus (CiteScore: 1.2)
Article Peer-Reviewed
Tourism and Wellbeing: Failures of Theory, Research and Practice
School of Business, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia
Academic Editor:
Received: 3 July 2025 Accepted: 28 August 2025 Published: 8 September 2025
Abstract
Across the social sciences, wellbeing measures are being developed to cover a more comprehensive picture of factors contributing to quality of life. However, ongoing neglect of the wellbeing outcomes of tourism activity has restricted the relevance of much tourism research, practice and policymaking globally. These include failure to recognise human wellbeing as the primary aim of any industrial development, including tourism; adherence to a superficial conception of the nature of wellbeing and its measures; a failure to acknowledge that human wellbeing, beyond “needs”, is an essential component of sustainable development; tourism stakeholder adherence to a primarily static, rather than dynamic conception of sustainability; failure to distinguish between “weak” and “strong” sustainability; uncritical adoption of a pro-growth mindset that is steadily depleting and degrading the resources and the wellbeing of life on the planet; failure to incorporate wellbeing outcomes into tourism business mission statements; and failure to treat seriously the need for tourism degrowth at least for some sectors of the industry. To address such failures, tourism decisionmakers must incorporate stakeholder wellbeing outcomes into conceptual analysis, empirical research and policy assessment.
Keywords
Copyright © 2025
Dwyer. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use and distribution provided that the original work is properly cited.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Cite this Article
Dwyer, L. (2025). Tourism and Wellbeing: Failures of Theory, Research and Practice. Highlights of Sustainability, 4(3), 192–204. https://doi.org/10.54175/hsustain4030012
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