Current Trends in Sustainable Tourism Destinations Over the Last Decade: A Bibliometric Analysis

Sustainable development is a topic that is currently being addressed by many industries around the world, including tourism. As a result, the topic of sustainable tourism has garnered a great deal of attention from the government, stakeholders, and academics. The tourism industry is regarded as one sector with a role to play in promoting environmentally friendly and responsible development for future generations. Practitioners, academics, and governments are working together to find solutions to put most countries’ agreed-upon principles of sustainable development into action. The hotel, transportation, restaurant, and travel industries are among those that have made significant strides in implementing the values of sustainable tourism development. This phenomenon is supported by numerous studies conducted on a large scale by academics and practitioners. However, in a more complex and macro context, such as destination management, this issue continues to receive little attention. The complexity of the elements that comprise a tourist destination also contributes to this phenomenon. According to some researchers, there are at least six major elements that comprise tourist destinations, or what is known as the 6A’sCIT, which include attractions, accessibility, amenities, ancillary services, activities, available packages, community empowerment, incentives, or investments, and technology. As a result, the goal of this research is to systematically examine research references on sustainable tourism destinations from 2012 to 2022. Using Scopus data, this study will specifically examine trends in the development of sustainable tourism destination research. A descriptive qualitative approach was used in this study, which combined the bibliometric method and a literature review. This study makes use of 200 international publication data with the keyword “sustainable tourism destinations” sourced via web scraping from the Scopus database. Only articles in English based on these keywords were used in the sample. As a result, because the Scopus database includes publications in languages other than English, this study does not cover all research on sustainable tourism destinations. According to the study's findings, the development of Scopus-indexed publication growth on the topic of sustainable tourism destinations was greatest from 2018 to 2022, with a total of 152 articles. Sustainability (Switzerland) is one of the journals that regularly publishes this issue, with a total of 30 articles. This review also divides sustainable tourism research trends into four major categories: research locations, research approaches, and research scopes or topics. Furthermore, this review organizes four major perspectives that are commonly used when discussing sustainable tourism destinations, including those concerning social and cultural factors, business, economy, and marketing, the environment and ecology, and infrastructure and technology. One of the study's limitations is the limited scope of the articles used, which were sourced from a single Scopus database. In the future, the recommendations in this study can be used as hypotheses and in-depth follow-up research, in addition to research with broader literature sources. The study's findings are expected to be useful to academics and researchers interested in studying sustainable tourism destinations.