Hall’s essay is an early and forceful attempt to move sustainable tourism beyond efficiency rhetoric toward limits on aggregate throughput. Its iconic idea is steady-state tourism: a system that permits qualitative development while refusing quantitative expansion that depletes natural capital. The theoretical contribution is the integration of degrowth, sufficiency and tourism studies against an economistic paradigm in which growth in arrivals, expenditure or GDP is treated as inherently desirable. Hall distinguishes efficiency from sufficiency and argues that sustainability requires both: resources must be used better, but demand, distance, replacement and consumption must also be moderated. Slow consumption therefore becomes more than an aesthetic of pace; it is a material strategy for reducing throughput while preserving meaningful activity. Conceptually, the paper extends lifecycle thinking from production into travel, asking research to account for the complete material trajectory of tourism experiences. It bridges ecological economics, sustainable consumption and tourism geography by relocating travel within the biophysical limits of the economy.