The concept of the ‘tourism experience’ has been considerably developed since the late twentieth century and reflects the shifting dynamics relative to tourist behavior and interactions with a destination. This is a reflection of broader societal and cultural changes in which travel as an experiential activity takes precedence over more traditional forms of sightseeing. The ‘tourism experience’ is a core concept in the modern study of tourism and encapsulates an array of interactions and perceptions that are influenced by, among other things, the tourist’s motivational factors, the nature of the destination, and the sociocultural environment in which travel takes place. It does so through a bibliometric approach in which the development of the concept of the ‘tourism experience’ has been studied over two decades, from 1996 to 2024. Our research gained access to 296,305 documents downloaded from Scopus and Web of Science, RStudio for data analysis, and VOSviewer for visual mapping. It therefore allows a structured analysis of academic ancestry, growth trajectory, thematic variation, and intricate patterns of tourism experience scholarship.