State-of-the-Art Review on the Rise of Experiential and Transformative Travel: Reassessing Value, Meaning and Impact

Experiential and transformative travel are increasingly central in tourism scholarship and “life-changing” marketing, yet the proliferation of these labels has produced conceptual drift and persistent accountability gaps. This paper presents a narrated critical integrative review that distinguishes experiential travel from transformative travel and synthesizes how value, meaning-making, impact and methods are theorized across stakeholders and time. Searches of Scopus and the Web of Science Core Collection, supplemented by citation chasing, yielded 1284 records; screening produced 168 tourism-focused and 103 foundational sources (271 total). Iterative coding indicates that experiential research commonly foregrounds experience design and short-horizon valuation, whereas transformative research emphasizes change-over-time yet often relies on tourist self-narratives. Across both streams, valuation expands from transactional utility to affective, existential and ethical registers but remains frequently tourist-centred; meaning-making is patterned by narrative scripts and platform mediation; and impacts are distributed and ambivalent across tourists, hosts/communities, environments and institutions. Methodologically, claims about durability and justice are often unsupported by designs that assess persistence, comparison and distribution. This state-of-the-art review paper contributes working definitions and boundary conditions, an integrative framework linking antecedents, encounter mechanisms, valuation and multi-stakeholder impacts, and a method-specified research agenda with minimum reporting standards to support accountable research and practice.