Bridging disciplines: a forward-looking agenda for tourism and wellbeing

This concluding article synthesizes insights from the Special Issue on Health-oriented Tourism to chart a forward-looking, interdisciplinary research agenda. It argues for moving beyond individualistic and consumerist framings of wellness toward holistic, relational, and systemic understandings of wellbeing in tourism. Drawing from public health, psychology, spirituality, and placemaking, the paper positions wellbeing-oriented tourism as a transformative space that connects physical, mental, social, and environmental dimensions of human flourishing. The discussion integrates nine contributions from the Special Issue, highlighting underexplored domains such as the continuum between medical and preventive health tourism, relational and social determinants of wellbeing, narrative and identity formation, temporal rhythms of experience, and spiritual–energy dimensions of wellbeing. It further identifies key structural gaps, including inequities in accessibility, commodification of traditional healing, and the lack of longitudinal, interdisciplinary, and ethically grounded research. The proposed conceptual model situates Holistic Wellbeing in Tourism at the core of three interconnected domains, Conceptual, Relational and Structural, and Epistemic and Methodological, framed by four pathways: Regenerative Ethos, Inclusive and Community-Centred Models, Science–Spirituality Bridge, and AI & Ethics Frontier. Together, these guide future scholarship toward a vision of tourism as a catalyst for collective healing, social justice, and planetary wellbeing.