A Systematic Literature Review of Rural Homestays and Sustainability in Tourism

This systematic literature review is designed to evaluate the current state of knowledge in rural homestays and tourism academic literature. With reference to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) flowchart, we reviewed 94 studies published in the selected journals from January 1, 2010, to December 31, 2020. Our review explores how sustainable rural homestays have been previously researched in terms of the context, topic, sample, method, geographical location, and theoretical framework. The review provides insights on sustainability and rural homestay tourism from the perspective of co-occurrence beside highlighting the valuable content addressed by authors and suggesting future research directions. In a sustainable rural tourism context, only 51% of the reviewed studies had considered homestay as the core and independent area of inquiry. This review notes an increasing number of researchers from developing countries are working on community-based rural homestays, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. Unfortunately, important topics—like homestay branding, homestay and entrepreneurship, homestays and information and communication technology (ICT) competency, homestay operator’s training and development about sustainability—are rarely addressed in the existing literature.