Business Sustainability: How Does Tourism Compare?

Abstract

Abstract:This study aims to empirically compare the adoption of business sustainability amongst 291 randomly-selected tourism and non-tourism businesses in New South Wales, Australia. Tourism businesses were found to be more committed to environmentally-sustainable practices than other types of businesses with there being a clear correlation with their ability to learn and adapt. This contradicts criticisms in the literature that tourism businesses are slow adopters of sustainability. This study highlights the need for further research into why tourism businesses in New South Wales, Australia, are reporting higher levels of performance in terms of adopting environmental values than other businesses in contradiction to the general perception of tourism businesses in the literature.

Do Online Comments Affect Environmental Management? Identifying Factors Related to Environmental Management and Sustainability of Hotels

“…The methodology used in this study was, in the first place, sentiment analysis of traveler reviews on the TripAdvisor platform that works with processes of machine learning and that was trained with an algorithm developed in Python connected to the Monkeylearn library (MonkeyLearn, San Francisco, CA, USA) based on the research of Londoño and Hernandez-Maskivker [3, 10,27,[66][67][68]. Subsequently, textual analysis of the negative, neutral, and positive reviews was conducted using the qualitative analysis software Nvivo Pro 12 [10,69,70], which identifies key factors for the management of environmental issues by Swiss hotels using the presented process as a methodological support in the research conducted by Saura et al [3,49,71,72].…”

“…Aiming to identify the key indicators that affect this industry due to its own evolution, we improved the indicators proposed by Saura et al [3] and Moyle et al [10] with the factors derived from a review carried out by Perrat [13]. The resulting factors are summarized in Table 4.…”

“…In the last decade, although sustainability in tourism has been a widely researched topic, little attention has been paid to the factors that favor sustainable management from the point of view of tourists [1,10,13].…”

“…Studies by Moyle et al [10], Butler [8] and Sharpley [14] used questionnaires to obtain information about the establishments and thus to assess whether the management is sustainable. Currently, research is being published that, supported by technological advances in tourism, identifies the opinions of tourists to extract the most important factors in the sustainability of the tourism sector management.…”

“…However, in their analysis of a random sample of 291 tourism and non-tourism companies in Australia, Moyle et al [10] concluded that tourism companies are more committed to sustainable environmental practices and demonstrate that tourism companies are not slower when adopting sustainable practices than companies in other industries. In this context, a legitimate question that arises is as follows: What are the factors that consumers in the tourism industry value the most in terms of sustainable practices, and how do these factors influence their decisions about the destinations they decide to visit?…”