Is regenerative tourism a paradigm shift for tourism cities? Comparative bibliometric evidence

Regenerative tourism is proposed as a successor to sustainable tourism, yet the claim remains largely conceptual, particularly for urban tourism destinations where governance challenges are acute. This paper provides empirical evidence of the structural transition through comparative bibliometric analysis, with explicit attention to tourism cities. A dual-corpus design was applied to 785 sustainable and 178 regenerative tourism publications from Scopus (2007–2026), following PRISMA 2020. Methods included annual production analysis, co-word analysis with Louvain detection, Callon’s Thematic Map, and geographic equity analysis. Regenerative tourism recorded a post-2019 CAGR of 44.3% against sustainable tourism’s − 3.4%. Co-word analysis identified 22 regeneration-exclusive keywords. Callon’s Thematic Map identified Transformative Practice as a motor theme unique to the regeneration paradigm. Contrasting inclusion indices (R: 0.50 vs. S: 0.80) indicated vocabulary rupture, and a 21:1 frontier keyword ratio positioned regeneration as the active site of innovation. Geographic analysis found 76.2% of publications from high-income countries; Africa contributes 3.8%. As a practical implication, city tourism managers and DMOs must redesign destination strategies around experiential quality and visitor-resident co-transformation rather than compliance-based metrics. The social implication is that tourism cities in low-income countries require knowledge co-production with high-income country institutions to build regenerative frameworks grounded in their own conditions.