Operationalizing Circular Hospitality: An Integrative Review and Governance-Ready 5D Management Framework

Abstract

Circular-economy research in hospitality has expanded from isolated waste-reduction practices to questions of procurement, digital measurement, stakeholder participation, and organizational change. Yet the available evidence remains difficult for hotel managers to convert into a governed investment portfolio: published reviews classify practices and barriers, while implementation decisions require owners, baselines, decision gates, auditable indicators, and feedback routines. An integrative review was therefore conducted to connect circular-hospitality evidence with management and governance mechanisms. The synthesis began from an established bibliometric map of 71 hospitality publications (2018–2024), audited its principal references and claims against publisher and DOI metadata, and incorporated peer-reviewed studies published through August 2026 that materially extended evidence on food systems, furniture and procurement, digital leadership, institutional pressures, and human participation. Sources were coded by operational domain, decision level, actor, information requirement, barrier, and outcome. Four mutually dependent governance functions emerged: strategic direction, knowledge mobilization, process control, and portfolio integration. On this basis, the article develops a five-stage 5D framework—Diagnose, Design, Deploy, Digitize, and Demonstrate—and specifies deliverables, decision gates, responsibilities, and denominator-aligned indicators for each stage. The resulting model shifts circularity from a catalogue of environmental initiatives to a repeatable management system. Its contribution is conceptual and translational rather than causal: it offers a testable architecture for hotel groups, independent properties, and destination partnerships, while identifying where longitudinal validation, common measurement rules, and evidence from emerging economies remain necessary.