This article focuses on one of the hotel industry’s key challenges: sustainable development. By reviewing the current impact and characteristics of this industry, its high potential to contribute to this challenge is established. The key question addressed here – especially interesting from a futures perspective – is whether the hotel industry is prepared to fulfil that potential. Through a review of relevant literature and 12 in-depth interviews with hoteliers in leading positions in Dutch hotels, this article evaluates to what extent the hotel industry’s current business models and its managers’ willingness and capabilities are ‘future proof’ from a sustainable development perspective. It concludes that the hotel industry is not yet able to make an optimal contribution and needs assistance to do so in the future, especially with respect to addressing guests’ needs and wants and (subsequent) institutionalization of sustainability, but the potential is there and maybe even more so than before.
Purpose -The objective of this paper is to examine the continuing debate over the nature, scope and definition of facilities management and the implications of FM practice in the field of outsourcing for the development of the field and the profession. Design/methodology/approach -The paper offers both a conceptual review of key issues in the definition of facilities management and a critique of these definitions in the context of the popular identity of facilities management as a means of generating cost savings through outsourcing. Findings -The discussion asserts that, perhaps contrary to the many published doubts expressed over the possibility of achieving consensus on the scope of facilities management, an emerging and broadly consensual model of facilities management can be discerned. This model, it is suggested, is inhibited from further development primarily because of a lack of leadership in the professional and academic communities together with a preoccupation by necessity of the FM profession with operational imperatives. Originality/value -The paper, through synthesis and critique, offers a variant perspective on the debate about the nature of facilities management.
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