Over the past two decades, positive psychology has increasingly been integrated into tourism research to explain the roles of emotions, experiences, and tourist well-being. However, this rapid development has also led to conceptual fragmentation and methodological concerns, as many studies have treated positive psychology primarily as a set of variables for measuring post-trip outcomes. This review study systematizes and reconceptualizes the field through a combination of bibliometric analysis and thematic analysis of 458 international publications retrieved from the Scopus database up to the end of 2025. The findings indicate that research on positive psychology in tourism is organized around four major thematic clusters: tourists’ emotions and behavioral responses; tourism experiences and well-being; hedonic and eudaimonic well-being; and related outcomes such as place attachment and sustainable behavior. Thereby, the study proposes a process-oriented conceptual framework that positions positive psychology as an interpretive foundation for understanding tourism experiences. Within this framework, well-being is understood not merely as an outcome, but as the result of psychological processes operating during and after the tourism experience. By shifting the analytical focus from the measurement of happiness to the processes through which well-being is constructed, this study contributes to expanding tourism experience research and offers a more integrative perspective for future studies.