Abstract The hospitality industry faces ongoing challenges in implementing sustainable strategies, despite increasing research on sustainable consumption. This study aims to explore the research landscape of sustainable consumption within the small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) hospitality sector, which remains fragmented and under-synthesised in existing tourism and sustainability research. Addressing this gap, the study identifies emerging trends, key research clusters, and strategic directions to foster long-term financial sustainability and competitiveness within the sector. A bibliometric analysis was conducted on 228 peer-reviewed articles retrieved from the Scopus database, selected for its comprehensive coverage of scholarly publications. CiteSpace was selected for its ability to identify collaboration networks, citation patterns, and keyword trends, thereby providing a structured overview of the intellectual development in this field. The analysis reveals that while the literature remains fragmented, dominant SME-oriented research clusters focus on sustainable consumption practices in hospitality operations, circular economy adoption under resource constraints, and strategic sustainability orientations linked to SME competitiveness, alongside emerging but less consolidated themes such as green innovation and digital sustainability. The findings provide valuable insights for hospitality SMEs, particularly in adopting circular economy principles to optimise resource utilisation and reduce operational costs, exploring the potential of green technologies as phased strategic investments, and communicating sustainability effectively to enhance brand value and market competitiveness. They also support policy design aimed at enhancing SME financial resilience and sustainability uptake as a driver of economic growth. Overall, this study contributes a systematic bibliometric synthesis of an underexplored research domain and establishes a foundation for future theory-driven and empirical research on sustainable consumption strategies tailored to hospitality SMEs.
Cheng et al. (Thu,) studied this question.