Could Happiness Be an Assessment Tool in Sustainable Tourism Management?

Abstract

The continuous commitment of companies from different sectors to demonstrate ethical demeanor of their business activities and bring about development of the respective economy, while maintaining the society’s wellbeing, has seen enormous activism in the last years. This has been very much evident in the tourism sector where the responsibility towards the society takes many forms, ranging from initiatives to promote activities for cleaner environment to programs for supporting quality of life and fair payment for employees and their families. Given this shift in policy making and execution of tourism market players, this paper aims to critically evaluate the extant sources of literature in the field of sustainable management of tourism, happiness concept in sustainable development and tourism, and on this premise – to blueprint a conceptual model that can serve entities in the industry for effective running of their sustainability courses of action. Happiness was accepted as one of the important goals of Sustainable Development with some United Nations resolutions. In this relation, happiness became an up-to-date topic in the Sustainable Development agenda as a way for holistic measure of success on the national and international levels. So, the authors would like to propose Business Gross Happiness as an indicator for companies in the sustainable tourism industry to measure their success in their course to sustainable development goals.