A systematic review of bleisure tourism scholarship in Africa: Scope and trends

Abstract

Bleisure tourism has experienced steady attention in global scholarship as destinations reposition themselves within the competitive business-travel markets. Yet, bleisure scholarship in the African context remains dispersed, sporadic, uneven in methodological depth and limited theorisation. This study presents a PRISMA-guided systematic review of bleisure tourism research in Africa to map its scope, identify dominant trends, and highlight persistent gaps. A structured search and screening process yielded a modest corpus of studies, with scholarly attention geographically concentrated in urban contexts in South Africa. The thematic synthesis emphasised traveller experiences and motivations, relying predominantly on descriptive, qualitative and survey-based designs, exhibiting limited theoretical integration. The review established that issues related to governance, destination planning, labour mobility, informality, and development policy remain marginal. With findings indicating that bleisure tourism scholarship in Africa is emergent and exploratory rather than consolidated, the review provides the first structured overview of this field in an African context and outlines priorities for future research aimed at strengthening conceptual grounding, methodological diversity, and comparative insight.