Life Cycle Approach: A Critical Review in the Tourism Sector

Sustainability is a key factor of competitiveness. It is important that sustainability assessments are effectively addressed in a global perspective. Therefore, beside instruments such as, for example, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Social Life Cycle Assessment, which analyze the environmental, economic and social impacts throughout the life cycle of a product/process or a service, different tools and approaches are adopted as strategic tools for the management to evaluate more in detail and in an organic manner the impacts in terms of sustainability. Among these, it is particularly significant that the Life Cycle Management, being still in its early stage of development, is not applied by means globally shared, but presents extremely promising methodological features. For these reasons, it seemed interesting to propose an application to tourism activities, for the particular characteristics of service delivery, which better than others lend themselves to the development of data related to sustainability. The main goal of this paper is to present a wide theoretical review in literature for the tourism sector application, characterizing gaps and critical issues and, at the same time, outlining the well-established assumptions and the unexplored themes by the international community about this topic.