Conceptualising co-created transformative tourism experiences: A systematic narrative review

Transformative tourism experiences (TE) have powerful personal and societal implications due to life-changing capacities when consumers subsume their experiences. Past reviews and conceptualisations of TE have been limited in scope, often emphasising a particular theory or context, and prioritising the consumer perspective. Given an increasing need to understand TE due to its implications concerning tourism sustainability, this study systematically reviews TE in travel and tourism. The study adopts a hybrid systematic narrative approach to build a holistic conceptual framework of TE from a co-created perspective, offering insights for future research. From the 125 studies, the review's findings revealed a massive dominance on qualitative approaches across seven broad experience categories concerning TE. These broad categories are general travel and tourism, educational, voluntourism, cultural, nature-based, wellness, and niche tourism experiences. From these seven broad categories of studies, three identified dimensions of TE were: experience, experience-facilitator, and experience-consumer. The inter-relations between these three dimensions produces four different outcomes to both the experience-consumer and experience-facilitator. While the findings indicate several areas for future research, three areas require greater attention: potential barriers, the role of culture in TE, and the potential for negative transformations.