Hotel Breakfast Buffets at the Experience–Sustainability Interface: Food Waste, Guest Experience, and the Limits of Digital Enablement

Hotel breakfast buffets combine a visible hospitality encounter with an operating system in which production surplus, buffet returns, and plate waste can arise, yet material and experiential outcomes are usually examined separately. This focused integrative review uses structured narrative synthesis, framework-guided thematic coding, source-to-claim mapping, and design-sensitive critical appraisal to examine 35 publications. Evidence directness and methodological credibility are assessed separately. Three publications paired a quantitative material waste measure with a quantitative experiential or satisfaction measure, but only one directly combined hotel breakfast buffet plate waste with field satisfaction; one concerned a related hotel buffet with intervention-specific experience measures, and one supplied transferable hotel restaurant evidence. The synthesis identifies context-specific support for selected behavioural interventions and setting-proximate operational evidence for measurement and tracking. Forecasting, simulation, and guest-facing digital applications remain dependent on local calibration and field validation. The paper proposes display and replenishment as a material–experiential service operations coupling point, treats abundance cues as an unvalidated sensitising proposition, and presents an evidence-calibrated two-pathway model and context-sensitive F&B decision matrix. The matrix links waste origins, interventions, operational indicators, experience safeguards, context, and illustrative local testing criteria. The framework is a research and local testing heuristic rather than a validated implementation protocol.