Towards Net-Zero Tourism: Redefining Sustainability in Travel and Hospitality

The tourism industry is increasingly recognising the need to adopt sustainable practices to reduce its significant environmental footprint. This paper presents a structured narrative review of the peer-reviewed and grey literature published between January 2000 and December 2025, retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect and Google Scholar, together with institutional reports from the UNWTO, IATA, IPCC and the World Travel and Tourism Council. The review makes three contributions. First, it defines net-zero tourism and delineates its conceptual boundaries against low-carbon tourism, green tourism, ecotourism, carbon-neutral tourism and sustainable tourism, clarifying how direct emissions reduction, residual emissions and offsetting relate within a net-zero accounting boundary. Second, it develops the Reduce–Substitute–Sequester–Govern (RSSG) analytical framework, a tourism-specific structure that orders mitigation options by their position in the emissions hierarchy rather than by industry sub-sector. Third, it synthesises the reported mitigation potential of the principal intervention families alongside their cost, technological maturity, evidentiary uncertainty and feasible scale, so that percentage reductions drawn from heterogeneous studies are not read as directly comparable. The intervention families examined are green hotel design, sustainable aviation fuel and electrified propulsion, eco-conscious itineraries, and carbon offset programmes. The review gives explicit attention to their limitations, including feedstock constraints and lifecycle accounting disputes in SAF, energy-density ceilings in electric aviation, rebound effects in efficiency retrofits, and additionality, permanence and leakage failures in offset markets. Achieving net-zero tourism requires substantial investment, technological maturation, consumer engagement and robust governance across the tourism value chain.