THE SHARING ECONOMY AND SUSTAINABLE TOURISM DEVELOPMENT: A CRITICAL REVIEW AND FUTURE RESEARCH AGENDA

Abstract

The sharing economy has profoundly restructured global tourism value chains over the past decade, yet its relationship with sustainable tourism development remains contested both theoretically and empirically. This study conducts a critical integrative review of influential scholarship on the sharing economy in tourism published between 2010 and 2026, combining citation tracking from landmark works with the purposive selection of studies offering salient contributions to each sustainability pillar, and anchoring the synthesis in a decade of audited platform and industry data (2015–2025). The study synthesises extant knowledge into six thematic streams: (1) conceptualisation and definitional debates; (2) motivations, trust, and participant behaviour; (3) economic impacts and competition with the traditional tourism sector; (4) social impacts on destination communities; (5) environmental impacts and ecological sustainability; and (6) governance and institutional responses. Descriptive evidence shows that the leading peer-to-peer accommodation platform grew from 72.4 million to 533.0 million booked nights and experiences between 2015 and 2025—an average growth rate roughly four times that of international tourist arrivals—while regulation moved through three generations, culminating in structural interventions such as New York City’s Local Law 18 and the European Union’s platform data regulation. The findings reveal four imbalances in the current literature: a platform bias towards accommodation (especially Airbnb), a contextual bias towards North America and Western Europe, a pillar bias towards economic over environmental dimensions, and a design bias towards cross-sectional over longitudinal studies. Drawing on the Theory–Context–Method (TCM) framework, the study proposes a future research agenda comprising nine directions, emphasising the need to test environmental rebound effects, extend research to emerging economies, integrate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and develop localised theoretical frameworks for transitional institutional contexts.