Article content
Abstract
Destination sustainability assessment has increasingly relied on life cycle-based standards to quantify environmental performance, while tourism research has traditionally focused on tourists' perceptions and behavioural intentions. Despite these parallel advances, a persistent gap remains between life-cycle environmental effectiveness and tourists' experiential and behavioural responses. This Perspective reframes destination sustainability assessment through a lifecycle and value-chain lens. Conceptualising destinations as tourism value chains, it argues that environmental impacts are unevenly distributed across stages and unevenly perceived by tourists. As a result, sustainability strategies risk misalignment when life-cycle impact hotspots remain experientially invisible, while highly visible practices carry limited environmental significance. Building on tourism satisfaction analytics and established standards (ISO 14064-1, ISO 14067, PAS 2060, PAS 2080), this paper proposes an interface framework linking life-cycle impact assessment with tourist perception and behavioural intention. Rather than replacing formal measurement, perception-based indicators function as diagnostic signals, revealing where environmental performance fails to translate into behavioural influence or where reputational risks may emerge. The framework also shows how tourism experience data can be operationalised as stage-specific perceptual and behavioural leverage indicators, anchored in PAS- and ISO-aligned accounting to support prioritisation and destination-level decision-making. The Perspective contributes a system-aware foundation for destination sustainability governance and a basis for future empirical validation.