Decisions on the adoption of environmental practices in a tourism context: pilot test on the hotels in southern Sardinia

The hotel sector is mainly composed of SMEs, which through their activity generate an impact on the environmental sustainability of the whole territory in which they operate, affecting the tourist supply quality of the destination and effectively undermining its competitiveness.

Given the correlation between the environmental heritage preservation and the businesses’ profitability, the latter represents the critical stakeholder in the pursuit of sustainable tourism development, whose adoption of environmental sustainability practices represents an instrument of protection precisely of that key factor on which their very existence depends. Therefore, the need to examine their sustainability behaviour emerges, influenced by both individual and contextual factors.

Based on these considerations, the Autor intended to address the topic of the relationship between tourism and the environment concerning the hotel sector, dealing with the theme of individual and contextual factors that influence the propensity and the decision to take action or not to take action in favour of environmental sustainability.

The analysis showed that the respondents have an attitude to sustainability mainly motivated by the eco-centric orientation and the socio-altruistic orientation secondarily. Despite this and the strong sense of responsibility regarding the protection of the environment that hoteliers have shown to possess, only slightly more than half of the respondents adopt several actions greater than or equal to the average of those adopted among the measures expressly provided for by the European Tourism Indicator System (ETIS).

Insufficient awareness about what happens in the area regarding sustainability in the hotel sector also emerged, in the light of which it can be assumed that the absence of collaboration characterizes the professional context. Furthermore, each hotelier acts individually to pursue its objectives sustainability, solely driven by individual interests; despite this, 88% of respondents affirm that the other operators’ behaviour is a stimulus to engage in the pursuit of environmental practices.

However, on the one hand, the hoteliers attribute responsibility for environmental issues and believe that the group “hoteliers in the area” effectively improves the sustainability performance of the whole destination. But on the other hand, they do not think that their incremental contribution as an individual hotelier is equally effective in pursuing the goal above.

The research represents the first experimentation of the context analysis applied to southern Sardinia. Further improvements and implementations are needed to make it an effective tool for both the hotel operators and the public entities. Indeed, it constitutes a knowledge base of the professional context in which the operators act, which can help increase the awareness level and stimulate the sense of belonging to the group and involvement in the tourist development of the destination, which is essential to pursue common and shared objectives of sustainability.

The methodology and results of the thesis are part of the contents of the website Monitour.org (currently under construction) dedicated to the Project “Destinations' Performance Measurement and the Role of Public Policies", headed by the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Cagliari, to which the author of the thesis collaborated as Research Assistant.