Supporting circular economy decisions in hospitality SMEs: A multi-criteria approach to strategy prioritization

Circular economy (CE) research has mainly focused on manufacturing and product-based sectors, while its application to service industries remains less understood. In services, circularity cannot be reduced to material loops, as it involves customer participation, organizational capabilities, service routines, and stakeholder coordination. Existing studies have widely examined CE practices, drivers, and barriers, but provide fewer tools for translating these elements into decision criteria, understood here as conditions used to compare the relative actionability of alternative circular strategies. This study develops and applies a multi-criteria decision support approach to Italian hospitality SMEs. Circular practices are classified into circular strategy options, while CE drivers and barriers are operationalized as economic-financial, technological-operational, stakeholder-related, and governance criteria that may facilitate or constrain implementation. By combining survey data collected from hospitality firms, expert-derived criteria weights, and stochastic multi-criteria acceptability analysis, the results indicate that reduction-oriented strategies show the most favourable average position across the four ranking methods, while asset renewal and life extension occupy comparatively favourable positions. Rethink, repurpose, and reuse have very similar expected ranks and cannot be meaningfully ordered. The study frames CE adoption in services as a prioritization process guided by predefined criteria and offers insights for resource efficiency, waste prevention, and cleaner service operations.