How Can a Circular Economy for Sustainable Tourism be Assessed? Evidence From an Ecological Resort in Taiwan

ABSTRACT Climate mandates pressure the tourism and hospitality industry to decarbonize rapidly, making circular economy implementation in fragile destinations an immediate priority. Hotels usually focus inward on building efficiencies. Ecological resorts, however, must operate within natural environments, a difference requiring a specialized framework that bridges natural resource assessment with stakeholder collaboration to reduce environmental degradation. We thus developed a circular framework tailored for forest eco‐resorts via a mixed‐methods design using three distinct panels. We ran a fuzzy Delphi survey to refine the indicators, used the analytic hierarchy process with 25 experts to weight them, and assessed practical field performance via 79 employee responses. This process yielded 52 indicators spanning seven subcategories. The conservation of natural resources scored the highest weight (0.0514), followed closely by the installation of water‐saving equipment (0.0433). The quadrant distributions demonstrated that destinations must first implement advanced technical strategies for robust wastewater treatment to anchor macrolevel circularity before behavioral programs can mature successfully. These indicators, ultimately, offer a robust assessment instrument for sustainable development throughout the eco‐resort sector.