Critical reflection and an integrative review on the effects of the cost-of-living crisis on sustainable tourism

This critical integrative review examines how the cost-of-living crisis reshapes sustainable tourism through economic pressure, public health, climate policy, community resilience, and socio-cultural wellbeing. We systematically screened Scopus records published from 2020 onward and analysed a final corpus of 71 Q1/Q2 journal articles using qualitative interpretation, topic modelling, semantic-network analysis, and visualization. Five themes emerged: tourism-related economic disruption and policy response; public health and education in crisis contexts; global economic policy and climate change; community resilience, tourism, and housing; and socio-cultural wellbeing. The synthesis reveals not only thematic convergence but also consequential disconnections, especially the weak integration of climate education with tourism governance and the limited attention paid to distributional effects across places and stakeholder groups. We therefore develop a prescriptive, evidence-informed Cost-of-Living Resilience Roadmap that translates the review into diagnostic indicators, staged actions, and evaluation criteria for destinations and tourism organizations. The roadmap connects affordability, decent work, community wellbeing, climate capability, and adaptive governance while explicitly accounting for uncertainty and contextual variation. The study contributes an interdisciplinary explanation of how financial strain can weaken or redirect sustainability transitions, a transparent mixed analytical review design, and an operational framework for policy and practice.