Sarcouncil Journal of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract: Sustainable tourism, overtourism, responsible tourism, regenerative tourism, and many more are related buzzwords that quantify the detrimental effects of tourism and measure quality of life. Academia engrossed themselves in summarising the conceptual framework of tourism with all aspects of community development, conservation of physical & cultural landscape, policies & measures though case studies and literature. Another catchword, meaningful tourism, emerges to bridge the path and be able to cover all aspects of tourism and measure the quality of life. Methodology: The term ‘meaningful’ often used by scholars in different perspectives but not specified the complete understanding of Meaningful tourism. This paper reviews the previous research on meaningful tourism. With the aid of Harzing’s perish or publish software, the researcher extracted all research papers from Google Scholar (18) and Scopus (7) with key words and titles meaningful tourism published from 2021 to 2023. The extraction of literature signifies that meaningful tourism studies are still in infant stage. Lots of study is required to fill the literature gaps. All research papers were well analysed, and research questions and key words were established and reviewed. Originality: To acquire an extensive understanding of meaningful tourism, the present research highlights the positive sustainability and quality of life through review extant literature, discuss the limitations and suggest directions for future research. Outcome: The mapping of the theoretical contributions implies the relevance of positive psychology, NET positive sustainability, eudaimonic and hedonic meaningful experience and positive wellbeing for quality of life. Suggestions are also made to further expand the traditional focus on the well-being of host communities and tourism stakeholders. This paper relies on observations and measurements made by previous researchers and, based on a conceptual structure of the antecedents and episodes, gives a complete overview and understanding of meaningful tourism.